Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics

Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics
Author: Theresa M. Kelley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 1988-03-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521343984

This book offers a fresh understanding of the role of aesthetics in Wordsworth's major poetry and prose. Arguing that Wordsworth presents sublimity and beauty as strata in the mind's aesthetic retrieval, Professor Kelley's 1988 text proposes geological precedents for this aesthetic model and evaluates its differences from the models developed by Burke, Kant and Hegel. This study sheds light on Wordworth and Romanticism in several ways. It establishes key differences between his aesthetics and that of Burke, Kant and other predecessors; it offers an insightful understanding of the aesthetic nature of Wordsworth's poetic achievement; and it grounds its close, rhetorical analysis of texts and figures in relevant historical and political contexts.

Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845

Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845
Author: Tim Fulford
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2019-02-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812250818

The later poetry of William Wordsworth, popular in his lifetime and influential on the Victorians, has, with a few exceptions, received little attention from contemporary literary critics. In Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845, Tim Fulford argues that the later work reveals a mature poet far more varied and surprising than is often acknowledged. Examining the most characteristic poems in their historical contexts, he shows Wordsworth probing the experiences and perspectives of later life and innovating formally and stylistically. He demonstrates how Wordsworth modified his writing in light of conversations with younger poets and learned to acknowledge his debt to women in ways he could not as a young man. The older Wordsworth emerges in Fulford's depiction as a love poet of companionate tenderness rather than passionate lament. He also appears as a political poet—bitter at capitalist exploitation and at a society in which vanity is rewarded while poverty is blamed. Most notably, he stands out as a history poet more probing and more clear-sighted than any of his time in his understanding of the responsibilities and temptations of all who try to memorialize the past.

Wordsworth’s Profession

Wordsworth’s Profession
Author: Thomas Pfau
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 478
Release: 1997
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804729024

In exploring Wordsworth's professionalization as a writer, the author's interpretations are coordinated by a single, albeit highly ramified, critical hypothesis: that Romanticism's aesthetic forms afforded the middle classes an imaginary furlough from the impinging consciousness of their tenuous socioeconomic status.

Wordsworth's Poetry and Prose (International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)

Wordsworth's Poetry and Prose (International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)
Author: William Wordsworth
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0393616924

The most accessible edition of Wordsworth’s poetry and prose, prepared to meet the needs of both students and scholars. This Norton Critical Edition presents a generous selection of William Wordworth’s poetry (including the thirteen-book Prelude of 1805) and prose works along with supporting materials for in-depth study. Together, the Norton Critical Editions of Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose and The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 are the essential texts for studying this author. Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose includes a large selection of texts chronologically arranged, thereby allowing readers to trace the author’s evolving interests and ideas. An insightful general introduction and textual introduction precede the texts, each of which is fully annotated. Illustrative materials include maps, manuscript pages, and title pages. “Criticism” collects thirty responses to Wordsworth’s poetry and prose spanning three centuries by British and American authors. Contributors include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Felicia Hemans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lucy Newlyn, Stephen Gill, Neil Fraistat, Mary Jacobus, Nicholas Roe, M. H. Abrams, Karen Swann, Michael O’Neill, and Geoffrey Hartman, among others. The volume also includes a Chronology, a Biographical Register, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles and First Lines of Poems.

Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure

Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure
Author: Alexander Freer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-10-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192599038

Wordsworth has traditionally been understood as the 'poet of memory'. This book argues that 'unremembered pleasure', an idea Wordsworth formulates in 'Tintern Abbey' but is often overlooked by modern readers, is central to understanding his writing. Wordsworth's poems discover and articulate a broad range of previously unfelt, unnoticed, and unconscious satisfactions. As well as providing new interpretations of major and under-studied writing by Wordsworth, this volume challenges a long tradition of psychoanalytic reading of romanticism, which uses trauma to explain the limits of literary memory. The book contests key psychoanalytic concepts in literary criticism including repression, sublimation, mourning, and pleasure. It asks what it would mean for us to be 'surprised by joy'.

William Wordsworth in Context

William Wordsworth in Context
Author: Andrew Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2015-02-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107028418

This book provides the essential contexts for an understanding of all aspects of the major English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth.

Wordsworth's Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception

Wordsworth's Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception
Author: Brian R Bates
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317322274

Wordsworth’s process of revision, his organization of poetic volumes and his supplementary writings are often seen as distinct from his poetic composition. Bates asserts that an analysis of these supplementary writings and paratexts are necessary to a full understanding of Wordsworth’s poetry.

Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women

Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women
Author: Judith W. Page
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2024-03-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520311221

Focusing on the poems of Wordsworth's "Great Decade," feminist critics have tended to see Wordsworth as an exploiter of women and "feminine" perspectives. In this original and provocative book, Judith Page examines works from throughout Wordsworth's long career to offer a more nuanced feminist account of the poet's values. She asks questions about Wordsworth and women from the point of view of the women themselves and of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture. Making extensive use of family letters, journals, and other documents, as well as unpublished material by the poet's daughter Dora Wordsworth, Page presents Wordsworth as a poet not defined primarily by egotistical sublimity but by his complicated and conflicted endorsement of domesticity and familial life. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Romantic Geography

Romantic Geography
Author: M. Wiley
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 230
Release: 1998-09-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230374263

Grounded in historical sources and informed by recent work in cultural, sociological, geographical and spatial studies, Romantic Geography illuminates the nexus between imaginative literature and geography in William Wordsworth's poetry and prose. It shows that eighteenth-century social and political interest groups contested spaces through maps, geographical commentaries and travel literature; and that by configuring 'utopian' landscapes Wordsworth himself participated in major social and political controversies in post-French Revolutionary England.

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation
Author: James M. Garrett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2016-02-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134782063

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.