William Wordsworth in Context

William Wordsworth in Context

Author: Andrew Bennett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-02-12

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1107028418

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


Wordsworth in Context

Wordsworth in Context

Author: Pauline Fletcher

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780838752241

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"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.


William Wordsworth in Context

William Wordsworth in Context

Author: Andrew Bennett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-02-12

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1316239829

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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.


William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

Author: Stephen Gill

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-04-08

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13: 0192551280

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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.


Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Author: Professor James M Garrett

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-04-28

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1409474984

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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.


Wordsworth and the Enlightenment

Wordsworth and the Enlightenment

Author: Alan Bewell

Publisher: New Haven : Yale University Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 9780300043938

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The first really thoroughgoing study of the subject. Both a fresh Wordsworth and, for Romanticists, a new 'anthropological' Enlightenment emerge from this book.-James K. Chandler


William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship

William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship

Author: Scott Hess

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0813932300

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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.


Wordsworth’s Profession

Wordsworth’s Profession

Author: Thomas Pfau

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 478

ISBN-13: 9780804729024

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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.


William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty

William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty

Author: Dr Heidi J Snow

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2014-01-28

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1409465934

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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.


Impure Conceits

Impure Conceits

Author: Alison Hickey

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780804729710

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This book redefines the place of the Wordsworthian imagination in a cultural moment often classified as the transition from “Romantic” to “Victorian.” Taking The Excursion and a constellation of related texts as a framework, the book suggests that the staggering critical neglect of Wordsworth's major project is correlated with the persistent inability of literary historians to chart that transition. To understand this elusive phase of literary and cultural history, the author proposes, we need to understand Wordsworth's role in it. The book reevaluates the significance of The Excursion, both in Wordsworth's corpus and in the contexts of the French Revolution and the post-Napoleonic industrial/imperial order leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832. Through a series of theoretically informed readings of The Excursion alongside other Wordsworthian texts, the author reveals Wordsworth's ongoing vital engagement with questions of imagination and ideology, questions that persist, in ever-shifting forms, through the continuities and discontinuities of historical “context.” Foregrounding problems of rhetorical interpretation as The Excursion's central concern, this study focuses on the implications of these problems for the text's promotion of a social vision. It examines various figural systems—family narratives, property, education, and imperialism—and shows how diverse critical strategies of assimilating poetic text to doctrine meet with a resistant “blankness” at the heart of the figural production of meaning in the poem. This blankness is suggestive of the gap between Wordsworth's poetry and its simple appropriation by cultural or political analysis. Paradoxically it also suggests that an understanding of the dynamics of poetic figuration is crucially relevant to any study of Wordsworth's social and political theory.