Wordsworth's Ethics

Wordsworth's Ethics
Author: Adam Potkay
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2015-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1421417022

A comprehensive examination that breathes new life into Wordsworth and the ethical concerns that were vital to his nineteenth-century readers. Why read Wordsworth’s poetry—indeed, why read poetry at all? Beyond any pleasure it might give, can it make one a better or more flourishing person? These questions were never far from William Wordsworth’s thoughts. He responded in rich and varied ways, in verse and in prose, in both well-known and more obscure writings. Wordsworth's Ethics is a comprehensive examination of the Romantic poet’s work, delving into his desire to understand the source and scope of our ethical obligations. Adam Potkay finds that Wordsworth consistently rejects the kind of impersonal utilitarianism that was espoused by his contemporaries James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in favor of a view of ethics founded in relationships with particular persons and things. The discussion proceeds chronologically through Wordsworth’s career as a writer—from his juvenilia through his poems of the 1830s and '40s—providing a valuable introduction to the poet’s work. The book will appeal to readers interested in the vital connection between literature and moral philosophy.

Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge

Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge
Author: N. Healey
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2012-04-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230391796

This book provides a reassessment of the writings of Hartley Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth and presents them in a new poetics of relationship, re-evaluating their relationships with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to restore a more accurate understanding of Hartley and Dorothy as independent and original writers.

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth
Author: Richard Gravil
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 978
Release: 2015-01-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191019658

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth's poetry, other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion, and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

Coleridge's Dejection Ode

Coleridge's Dejection Ode
Author: J.C.C. Mays
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2019-01-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 303004131X

Coleridge's Dejection Ode completes J.C.C. Mays’ analysis of Coleridge’s poetry, following Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (Palgrave 2016) and Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics (Palgrave 2013). "Dejection: An Ode" stands alone in Coleridge's oeuvre: written at a time of personal crisis, it reaches far back and deeply into his thinking in an attempt to find a poematic solution to ideas and problems he had mulled over for a long time. Mays reveals how the poem also marks the opening of the second half of Coleridge's career as both poet and thinker. In three central chapters Mays examines the new style that evolved in the process of writing the Ode: the technical means of metrics, rhyme and grammar; language and allusion; and symbol and structure. He recounts the complex, sometimes controversial critical history of the Ode, and suggests an editorial solution to the problem created by the Letter to Sara Hutchinson; re-evaluates the position of Wordsworth in the poem apropos the political statement it makes; clarifies the distinction between the views on Imagination expressed and those contained in Biographia Literaria; and traces the links of the concept "dejection" as it underpins Coleridge's late poems.

Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century

Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century
Author: Alexander Dick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317314522

Brings together scholars who use literary interpretation and discourse analysis to read 18th-century British philosophy in its historical context. This work analyses how the philosophers of the Enlightenment viewed their writing; and, how their institutional positions as teachers and writers influenced their understanding of human consciousness.

The Absent God in the Works of William Wordsworth

The Absent God in the Works of William Wordsworth
Author: Eliza Borkowska
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2020-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000263916

Called by one of its reviewers "Wordsworth’s biographia literaria," this book takes its reader on a fascinating journey into the mind of the poet whose attitude to God and religion points to a major shift in Western culture. The monograph probes the philosophical foundations of Wordsworth’s religious outlook, drawing attention to this First Generation Romantic poet as the author who happened to record in his verse the rise to prominence of some of the intellectual and spiritual challenges and the most troublesome uncertainties that have defined Western man ever since. The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with the companion volume, The Presence of God in the Works of William Wordsworth. These two works can be regarded as contraries—or negatives: one offering an ironically positive reading of Wordsworth’s religious discourse, the other offering a reading which is positively negative.

Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism

Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism
Author: Eric C. Walker
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804760926

Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism studies marriage in two sets of literary texts from the Regency decade: the novels of Jane Austen—who avoided marriage in her own life but seems to have written about nothing else—and a set of non-canonical and generally unfamiliar poems by William Wordsworth, who seems never to turn to the subject of his own marriage. With other Romantic writers who also figure in this study, Austen and Wordsworth confronted the impossibility of writing about anything other than marriage and the imperative either to celebrate or condemn it. Thanks to the latest scholarly editions of Wordsworth, Walker introduces previously undiscussed material. Walker reads conjugality as the compulsory ground of modern identity, an Enlightenment legacy we still grapple with today, and offers new perspectives on literature through the writing of Austen and Wordsworth and theories of marriage in Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and, in our time, Adam Phillips and Stanley Cavell.

Wordsworth's Vagrants

Wordsworth's Vagrants
Author: Quentin Bailey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2016-02-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134782276

Wordsworth's Vagrants explores the poet's treatment of the 'idle and disorderly' in the context of the penal laws of the 1790s, when the terror of the French Revolution caused a crackdown on the beggars and vagrants who roamed the English countryside. From his work on the Salisbury Plain poems through to the poetry about vagrants, beggars, and lunatics in Lyrical Ballads, Quentin Bailey argues, Wordsworth attempted to imagine a way of relating to the vagrant and criminal poor that could challenge the systematizing impulses of William Pitt and Jeremy Bentham. Whereas writers had previously relied on sensibility and fellow-feeling to reveal the correct ordering of society, Wordsworth was writing in a period in which legislators, magistrates, and commentators agreed that a more aggressively interventionist approach and new institutional solutions were needed to tackle criminality and establish a disciplined and obedient workforce. Wordsworth's interest in individual psychology and solitude, Bailey suggests, grew out of his specific awareness of the Bloody Code and the discussions surrounding it. His study offers a way of reading Wordsworth's poetry that is sensitive to his early radicalism but which does not equate socio-political engagement solely with support for the French Revolution.

The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English:

The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English:
Author: Peter France
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 612
Release: 2006-02-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199246238

Translation has played a vital part in the history of literature throughout the English-speaking world. Offering for the first time a comprehensive view of this phenomenon, this pioneering five-volume work casts a vivid new light on the history of English literature. Incorporating critical discussion of translations, it explores the changing nature and function of translation and the social and intellectual milieu of the translators.