The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family, 1803–1829
The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family, 1803–1829

Author: Jessica Fay

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2021-04-01

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1800858655

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Sir George Beaumont is a key figure in the history of British art. As well as being a respected amateur landscape painter, he was a prominent patron, a collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. William Wordsworth described Beaumont’s friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and this edition reveals that the two men became collaborators as well as companions. In addition to documenting unique perspectives on social, political, and cultural events of the early nineteenth century (providing new contexts for reading Wordsworth’s mature poetry), the letters collected here chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that – in influence, creativity, and affection – rivals Wordsworth’s more famous exchange with Coleridge at Nether Stowey in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended study of how Wordsworth and Beaumont helped shape one another’s work, tracing processes of mutual artistic development that involved not only a meeting of aristocratic refinement and rural simplicity, of a socialite and a lover of retirement, of a painter and a poet, but also an aesthetic rapprochement between neoclassical and romantic values, between the impulse to idealize and the desire to particularize.

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation
Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Author: James M. Garrett

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-17

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1134782063

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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 Cultivation of Women
Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women

Author: Judith W. Page

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-03-29

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0520311221

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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.

The Works of Thomas De Quincey, Part I Vol 1
The Works of Thomas De Quincey, Part I Vol 1

Author: Grevel Lindop

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-30

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 1000749673

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Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) is considered one of the most important English prose writers of the early-19th century. This is the first part of a 21-volume set presenting De Quincey's work, also including previously unpublished material.

Dorothy Wordsworth's Ecology
Dorothy Wordsworth's Ecology

Author: Kenneth Cervelli

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-02-27

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1135861080

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Dorothy Wordsworth has a unique place in literary studies. Notoriously self-effacing, she assiduously eschewed publication, yet in her lifetime, her journals inspired William to write some of his best-known poems. Memorably depicting daily life in a particular environment (most famously, Grasmere), these journals have proven especially useful for readers wanting a more intimate glimpse of arguably the most important poet of the Romantic period. With the rise of women’s studies in the 1980s, however, came a shift in critical perspective. Scholars such as Margaret Homans and Susan Levin revaluated Dorothy’s work on its own terms, as well as in relation to other female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of a larger shift in the academy, feminist-oriented analyses of Dorothy’s writings take their place alongside other critical approaches emerging in the 1980s and into the next decade. One such approach, ecocriticism, closely parallels Dorothy’s changing critical fortunes in the mid-to-late 1980s. Curiously, however, the major ecocritical investigations of the Romantic period all but ignore Dorothy’s work while at the same time emphasizing the relationship between ecocriticism and feminism. The present study situates Dorothy in an ongoing ecocritical dialogue through an analysis of her prose and poetry in relation to the environments that inspired it.

Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance
Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance

Author: Jessica Fay

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-05-03

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0192548166

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This is the first extended study of Wordsworth's complex, subtle, and often conflicted engagement with the material and cultural legacies of monasticism. It reveals that a set of topographical, antiquarian, and ecclesiastical sources consulted by Wordsworth between 1806 and 1822 provided extensive details of the routines, structures, landscapes, and architecture of the medieval monastic system. In addition to offering a new way of thinking about religious dimensions of Wordsworth's work and his views on Roman Catholicism, the book offers original insights into a range of important issues in his poetry and prose, including the historical resonances of the landscape, local attachment and memorialization, gardening and cultivation, Quakerism and silence, solitude and community, pastoral retreat and national identity. Wordsworth's interest in monastic history helps explain significant stylistic developments in his writing. In this often-neglected phase of his career, Wordsworth undertakes a series of generic experiments in order to craft poems capable of reformulating and refining taste; he adapts popular narrative forms and challenges pastoral conventions, creating difficult, austere poetry that, he hopes, will encourage contemplation and subdue readers' appetites for exciting narrative action. This book thus argues for the significance and innovative qualities of some of Wordsworth's most marginalized writings. It grants poems such as The White Doe of Rylstone, The Excursion, and Ecclesiastical Sketches the centrality Wordsworth believed they deserved, and reveals how Wordsworth's engagement with the monastic history of his local region inflected his radical strategies for the creation of taste.

Mountaineering and British Romanticism
Mountaineering and British Romanticism

Author: Simon Bainbridge

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-04-16

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 0192599763

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This book examines the relationship between Romantic-period writing and the activity that Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened 'mountaineering' in 1802. It argues that mountaineering developed as a pursuit in Britain during the Romantic era, earlier than is generally recognised, and shows how writers including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Walter Scott were central to the activity's evolution. It explores how the desire for physical ascent shaped Romantic-period literary culture and investigates how the figure of the mountaineer became crucial to creative identities and literary outputs. Illustrated with 25 images from the period, the book shows how mountaineering in Britain had its origins in scientific research, antiquarian travel, and the search for the picturesque and the sublime. It considers how writers engaged with mountaineering's power dynamics and investigates issues including the politics of the summit view (what Wordsworth terms 'visual sovereignty'), the relationships between different types of 'mountaineers', and the role of women in the developing cultures of ascent. Placing the work of canonical writers alongside a wide range of other types of mountaineering literature, this book reassesses key Romantic-period terms and ideas, such as vision, insight, elevation, revelation, transcendence, and the sublime. It opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between Romantic-period writers and the world that they experienced through their feet and hands, as well as their eyes, as they moved through the challenging landscapes of the British mountains.

Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism
Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism

Author: Eric C. Walker

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0804760926

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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.