Author : Andrew Bennett
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 50,13 MB
Release : 2015-02-12
Category : History
ISBN : 1107028418
This book provides the essential contexts for an understanding of all aspects of the major English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth.
Author : Pauline Fletcher
Publisher : Bucknell University Press
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 18,7 MB
Release : 1992
Category : English poetry
ISBN : 9780838752241
"Essays by several contributors represent a marriage between traditional textual scholarship and issues raised by contemporary theory and criticism. Jonathan Wordsworth discusses the making and remaking of The Prelude, along with other examples of the long poem in English; he emphasizes the shifting nature of both the text and the self and questions traditional assumptions about authorial intention and the possibility of producing authoritative texts. Pamela Woof brings an awareness of recent developments in feminist theory and gender studies to bear on her exploration of the role of Dorothy Wordsworth in the engendering of her brother's poetry, while Jared Curtis uses close textual analysis of a poem that was originally drafted by William, revised by Dorothy, and published by Coleridge, to raise issues of intertextuality and collective authorship." "Such accommodation between traditional scholarship and contemporary trends is by no means universal, and the present volume closes with Helen Vendler's fierce attack on the New Historicism, which she sees as hostile to the lyric impulse. Academic revolutions, as we know, can generate violent debate, but such debate should surely be welcomed as a guarantee of the continuing vitality of the discipline."--BOOK JACKET.
Author : Andrew Bennett
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 49,31 MB
Release : 2015-02-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1316239829
William Wordsworth's poetry responded to the enormous literary, political, cultural, technological and social changes that the poet lived through during his lifetime (1770‒1850), and to his own transformation from young radical inspired by the French Revolution to Poet Laureate and supporter of the establishment. The poet of the 'egotistical sublime' who wrote the pioneering autobiographical masterpiece, The Prelude, and whose work is remarkable for its investigation of personal impressions, memories and experiences, is also the poet who is critically engaged with the cultural and political developments of his era. William Wordsworth in Context presents thirty-five concise chapters on contexts crucial for an understanding and appreciation of this leading Romantic poet. It focuses on his life, circle, and composition; on his reception and influence; on the significance of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century literary contexts; and on the historical, political, scientific and philosophical issues that helped to shape Wordsworth's poetry and prose.
Author : Stephen Gill
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 584 pages
File Size : 46,36 MB
Release : 2020-04-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0192551280
In this second edition of William Wordsworth: A Life, Stephen Gill draws on knowledge of the poet's creative practices and his reputation and influence in his life-time and beyond. Refusing to treat the poet's later years as of little interest, this biography presents a narrative of the whole of Wordsworth's long life—1770 to 1850—tracing the development from the adventurous youth who alone of the great Romantic poets saw life in revolutionary France to the old man who became Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate. The various phases of Wordsworth's life are explored with a not uncritical sympathy; the narrative brings out the courage he and his wife and family were called upon to show as they crafted the life they wanted to lead. While the emphasis is on Wordsworth the writer, the personal relationships that nourished his creativity are fully treated, as are the historical circumstances that affected the production of his poetry. Wordsworth, it is widely believed, valued poetic spontaneity. He did, but he also took pains over every detail of the process of publication. The foundation of this second edition of the biography remains, as it was of the first, a conviction that Wordsworth's poetry, which has given pleasure and comfort to generations of readers in the past, will continue to do so in the years to come.
Author : Dr Heidi J Snow
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 47,45 MB
Release : 2014-01-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1409465934
Exploring the relationship between poverty and religion in William Wordsworth’s poetry, Heidi J. Snow challenges the traditional view that the poet’s early years were primarily irreligious. She argues that this idea, based on the equation of Christianity with Anglicanism, discounts the richly varied theological landscape of Wordsworth’s youth. Reading Wordsworth’s poetry in the context of the diversity of theological views represented in his milieu, Snow shows that poems like The Excursion reject Anglican orthodoxy in favor of a meld of Quaker, Methodist, and deist theologies. Rather than support a narrative of Wordsworth’s life as a journey from atheism to orthodoxy or even from radicalism to conservatism, therefore, Wordsworth’s body of work consistently makes a case for a sensitive approach to the problem of the poor that relies on a multifaceted theological perspective. To reconstruct the religious context in which Wordsworth wrote in its complexity, Snow makes extensive use of the materials in the record offices of the Lake District and the religious sermons and congregational records for the orthodox Anglican, evangelical Anglican, Methodist, and Quaker congregations. Snow’s depiction of the multiple religious traditions in the Lake District complicates our understanding of Wordsworth’s theological influences and his views on the poor.
Author : Professor James M Garrett
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 375 pages
File Size : 41,85 MB
Release : 2013-04-28
Category : 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.
Author : Thomas Pfau
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 478 pages
File Size : 47,20 MB
Release : 1997
Category : 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.
Author : Scott Hess
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 49,99 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0813932300
In William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship, Scott Hess explores Wordsworth's defining role in establishing what he designates as "the ecology of authorship" a primarily middle-class, nineteenth-century conception of nature associated with aesthetics, high culture, individualism, and nation. Instead of viewing Wordsworth as an early ecologist, Hess places him within a context that is largely cultural and aesthetic. The supposedly universal Wordsworthian vision of nature, Hess argues, was in this sense specifically male, middle-class, professional, and culturally elite--factors that continue to shape the environmental movement today.
Author : David Simpson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 31,77 MB
Release : 2014-08-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1317620321
Traditionally, Wordsworth’s greatness is founded on his identity as the poet of nature and solitude. The Wordsworthian imagination is seen as an essentially private faculty, its very existence premised on the absence of other people. In this title, first published in 1987, David Simpson challenges this established view of Wordsworth, arguing that it fails to recognize and explain the importance of the context of the public sphere and the social environment to the authentic experience of the imagination. Wordsworth’s preoccupation with the metaphors of property and labour shows him to be acutely anxious about the value of his art in a world that he regarded as corrupted. Through close examination of a few important poems, both well-known and relatively unknown, Simpson shows that there is no unitary, public Wordsworth, nor is there a conflict or tension between the private and the public. The absence of any clear kind of authority in the voice that speaks the poems makes Wordsworth’s poetry, in Simpson’s phrase, a ‘poetry of displacement’.
Author : Emma Mason
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : pages
File Size : 14,95 MB
Release : 2010-08-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1139491636
William Wordsworth is the most influential of the Romantic poets, and remains widely popular, even though his work is more complex and more engaged with the political, social and religious upheavals of his time than his reputation as a 'nature poet' might suggest. Outlining a series of contexts - biographical, historical and literary - as well as critical approaches to Wordsworth, this Introduction offers students ways to understand and enjoy Wordsworth's poetry and his role in the development of Romanticism in Britain. Emma Mason offers a completely up-to-date summary of criticism on Wordsworth from the Romantics to the present and an annotated guide to further reading. With definitions of technical terms and close readings of individual poems, Wordsworth's experiments with form are fully explained. This concise book is the ideal starting point for studying Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, and the major poems as well as Wordsworth's lesser known writings.
