Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation
Author: Professor James M Garrett
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2013-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1409474984

Shedding fresh light on Wordsworth's contested relationship with an England that changed dramatically over the course of his career, James Garrett places the poet's lifelong attempt to control his literary representation within the context of national ideas of self-determination represented by the national census, national survey, and national museum. Garrett provides historical background on the origins of these three institutions, which were initiated in Britain near the turn of the nineteenth century, and shows how their development converged with Wordsworth's own as a writer. The result is a new narrative for Wordsworth studies that re-integrates the early, middle, and late periods of the poet's career. Detailed critical discussions of Wordsworth's poetry, including works that are not typically accorded significant attention, force us to reconsider the usual view of Wordsworth as a fading middle-aged poet withdrawing into the hills. Rather, Wordsworth's ceaseless reworking of earlier poems and the flurry of new publications between 1814 and 1820 reveal Wordsworth as an engaged public figure attempting to 'write the nation' and position himself as the nation's poet.

The Hidden Wordsworth

The Hidden Wordsworth
Author: Kenneth R. Johnston
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 1018
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780393046236

A surprise-filled biography of a radical young poet whose fiery intellect revolutionized English poetry. Based on new research in government archives in England and France, school and university records, and intimate letters, THE HIDDEN WORDSWORTH is a warts-and-all account of the renowned poet as a youth, who lived a life even Byron would have envied. Photos.

Pathologies of Motion

Pathologies of Motion
Author: Kevis Goodman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2022-12-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300268645

An original study of late Enlightenment aesthetics, poetics, and environmental medicine as overlapping ways of comprehending the dislocations of historical existence lodged in the movements of bodies and minds This book studies later eighteenth-century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly concerned about the relationship between the geographical movements of persons displaced from home and the physiological or nervous “motions” within their bodies and minds. Looking beyond familiar narratives about medicine and art’s shared therapeutic and harmonizing ideals, this book explores Enlightenment and Romantic-era aesthetics and poetics in relation to a central but less well known area of eighteenth-century environmental medicine: pathology. No mere system of diagnosis or classification, philosophical pathology was an art of interpretation, offering sophisticated ways of reading the multiple conditions and causes of disease, however absent from perception, in their palpable, embodied effects. For medical, anthropological, environmental, and literary authors alike, it helped to locate the dislocations of modern mobility when a full view of their causes and conditions remained imperfectly understood or still unfolding. Goodman traces the surprising afterlife of the period’s exemplary but unexplained pathology of motion, medical nostalgia, within aesthetic theory and poetics, arguing that nostalgia persisted there not as a named condition but as a set of formal principles and practices, perturbing claims about the harmony, freedom, and free play of the mind.

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth
Author: John Williams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2017-03-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137266015

From the earliest reviews of his poetry, readers were deeply divided on the merits of William Wordsworth's work. John Williams looks in detail at the major poems and discusses the critical issues that have dominated discussions of Wordsworth's compositions since they first began to appear in print after 1798. Beginning with a fresh assessment of the controversies that developed around Lyrical Ballads, the chapters trace the evolution of both Wordsworth's poetry and his reputation through to his death in 1850. At each stage, Williams investigates the possible reasons why critics and readers responded as they did: enraged by his revolutionary 'Jacobinism' at the turn of the eighteenth century; insulted by the 'simplicity' of the Poems in Two Volumes of 1807; reassured by his commitment to Nature and his reverence for Church and State in the early Victorian period. In the twentieth century, Wordsworth has been subjected to a series of extensive critical reappraisals. With reference to a wide range of the poetry, Williams goes on to discuss the way Wordsworth has been variously reconstructed as a consequence of the main critical and theoretical initiatives of the last one hundred years. He also examines the Wordsworth we have inherited for the twenty-first century: a poet many still feel has important things to say to the contemporary reader about human relationships, nature, the environment, and our imaginative life.

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth
Author: John L. Mahoney
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2024-10-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1531510833

Available in a new digital edition with reflowable text suitable for e-readers William Wordsworth: A Poetic Life is a new biography of the great father of British Romanticism. It is new in several ways, most notably in the way it approaches the life of the poet. Paying its proper respect to the classic lives of Wordsworth by Mary Moorman and Stephen Gill, it attempts to tell the story of the life through a more rigorous reading of key and representative works of the poet, through careful blending of life and poetry. Wordsworth offers the story of the literariness of the poet's life - childhood and adolescence in the Lake District, education at Cambridge, love and political radicalism in France, the long period of residence in Grasmere and Rydal, celebrity, and national and international recognition. Its reading of the poems, in tune with current theoretical practice, offers a sense of the continuities in Wordsworth's career as it moves away from familiar theories of a Golden Decade of creativity and a period of long decline. The book also works closely and rigorously with Wordsworth's poetry as a method of dramatizing the essentially poetic character of the poet's life.

Friending the Past

Friending the Past
Author: Alan Liu
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2018-11-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022645195X

Can today’s society, increasingly captivated by a constant flow of information, share a sense of history? How did our media-making forebears balance the tension between the present and the absent, the individual and the collective, the static and the dynamic—and how do our current digital networks disrupt these same balances? Can our social media, with its fleeting nature, even be considered social at all? In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history—such as prehistorical oral societies with robust storytelling cultures, or the great print works of nineteenth-century historicism—and our own instantaneous present. He concludes with a surprising look at how the sense of history exemplified in today’s JavaScript timelines compares to the temporality found in Romantic poetry. Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive “network archaeologies” can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other. These conceptual architectures of period and age are also always media structures, scaffolded with the outlines of what we mean by history. Thinking about our own time, Liu wonders if the digital, networked future can sustain a similar sense of history.

Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture

Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture
Author: Charles J. Rzepka
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317057600

Gathered together for the first time, the essays in this volume were selected to give scholars ready access to important late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century contributions to scholarship on the Romantic period and twentieth-century literature and culture. Included are Charles J. Rzepka's award-winning essays on Keats's 'Chapman's Homer' sonnet and Wordsworth's 'Michael' and his critical intervention into anachronistic new historicist readings of the circumstances surrounding the composition of "Tintern Abbey." Other Romantic period essays provide innovative interpretations of De Quincey's relation to theatre and the anti-slavery movement. Genre is highlighted in Rzepka's exploration of race and region in Charlie Chan, while his interdisciplinary essay on The Wizard of Oz and the New Woman takes the reader on a journey that encompasses the Oz of L. Frank Baum and Victor Fleming as well as the professional lives of Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. Taken together, the essays provide not only a career retrospective of an influential scholar and teacher but also a map of the innovations and controversies that have influenced literary studies from the early 1980s to the present. As Peter Manning observes in his foreword, "this collection shows that even in diverse essays the force of a curious and disciplined mind makes itself felt."

Men Writing the Feminine

Men Writing the Feminine
Author: Thais E. Morgan
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 1994-08-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438413572

What happens when a male author writes the feminine? Can a male author completely identify with a woman? Or does a male author always write through a woman's voice for purposes of his own? This fascinating collection explores these and other questions about gender and writing from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, including pyschoanalysis, semiotics, deconstruction, feminism, postmodernism, and discourse analysis. The introductory essay provides an overview of current issues and methodologies in gender theory, while the 11 essays in the book discuss novels and poems, from the seventeenth century to the present, by British, American, and French male writers who speak as, through, or like the feminine. Authors considered in this book include George Herbert, William Wordsworth, John Hawkes, Denis Diderot, Paul Verlaine, Randell Jarrell, John Berryman, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. The collection ends with a piece on the future of men in feminism, a discussion of women's and gay and lesbian studies, and a debate on future directions in gender theory. Also included is a selected bibliography of recent books of interest to scholars and students working on literature, theory, and gender. Men Writing the Feminine is designed for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. It addresses men as well as women and promotes dialogue about the variety of gender positions represented in literature and theory.

Romanticism, Lyricism, and History

Romanticism, Lyricism, and History
Author: Sarah M. Zimmerman
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1999-05-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780791441107

Argues against the persistent view of Romantic lyricism as inherently introspective by relating the poems of William Wordsworth, John Clare, and Charlotte Smith, as well as the letters and prose works of Dorothy Wordsworth, to their historical and literary contexts.