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Author: Don H. Bialostosky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521412490
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Wordsworth's poetry has been a focus for many of the theoretical schools of criticism that comprise modern literary studies. Don Bialostosky here proposes to adjudicate the diverse claims of these numerous schools and to trace their implications for teaching. Bialostosky draws on the work of Bakhtin and his followers to create a 'dialogic' critical synthesis of what Wordsworth's readers - from Coleridge to de Man - have made of his poetry. He reveals Wordsworth's poetry as itself 'dialogically' responding to its various contexts, and opens up fruitful possibilities for criticism and teaching of Wordsworth. This challenging book uses the case of Wordsworth studies to make a far-reaching survey of modern literary theory and its implications for the practice of criticism and teaching today.
Author: Don H. Bialostosky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521412490
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Wordsworth's poetry has been a focus for many of the theoretical schools of criticism that comprise modern literary studies. Don Bialostosky here proposes to adjudicate the diverse claims of these numerous schools and to trace their implications for teaching. Bialostosky draws on the work of Bakhtin and his followers to create a 'dialogic' critical synthesis of what Wordsworth's readers - from Coleridge to de Man - have made of his poetry. He reveals Wordsworth's poetry as itself 'dialogically' responding to its various contexts, and opens up fruitful possibilities for criticism and teaching of Wordsworth. This challenging book uses the case of Wordsworth studies to make a far-reaching survey of modern literary theory and its implications for the practice of criticism and teaching today.
Author: Adam Potkay
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421417022
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
A comprehensive examination that breathes new life into Wordsworth and the ethical concerns that were vital to his nineteenth-century readers. Why read Wordsworth’s poetry—indeed, why read poetry at all? Beyond any pleasure it might give, can it make one a better or more flourishing person? These questions were never far from William Wordsworth’s thoughts. He responded in rich and varied ways, in verse and in prose, in both well-known and more obscure writings. Wordsworth's Ethics is a comprehensive examination of the Romantic poet’s work, delving into his desire to understand the source and scope of our ethical obligations. Adam Potkay finds that Wordsworth consistently rejects the kind of impersonal utilitarianism that was espoused by his contemporaries James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in favor of a view of ethics founded in relationships with particular persons and things. The discussion proceeds chronologically through Wordsworth’s career as a writer—from his juvenilia through his poems of the 1830s and '40s—providing a valuable introduction to the poet’s work. The book will appeal to readers interested in the vital connection between literature and moral philosophy.
Author: Simon Jarvis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139462662
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
Wordsworth wrote that he longed to compose 'some philosophic Song/Of Truth that cherishes our daily life'. Yet he never finished The Recluse, his long philosophical poem. Simon Jarvis argues that Wordsworth's aspiration to 'philosophic song' is central to his greatness, and changed the way English poetry was written. Some critics see Wordworth as a systematic thinker, while for others he is a poet first, and a thinker only (if at all) second. Jarvis shows instead how essential both philosophy and the 'song' of poetry were to Wordsworth's achievement. Drawing on advanced work in continental philosophy and social theory to address the ideological attacks which have dominated much recent commentary, Jarvis reads Wordsworth's writing both critically and philosophically, to show how Wordsworth thinks through and in verse. This study rethinks the relation between poetry and society itself by analysing the tensions between thinking philosophically and writing poetry.
Author: Sally Bushell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135190406X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 422
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Book Description
Re-Reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice is a groundbreaking study, which transforms contemporary critical understanding of The Excursion and of the place of this long poem in the Wordsworthian canon. Sally Bushell argues that the poem, which has suffered at the hands of critics for most of the twentieth century, has been unfairly judged according to a Coleridgean rather than a Wordsworthian definition of "philosophy"-that it has been read as a didactic work, rather than one which uses its dramatic form to teach its readers to think for themselves. She offers a new reading in which The Excursion is shown to be about providing the readers with moral habits and mental constructs by which to learn, not simply telling them what to think. The book begins with a discussion of the reception of the poem in 1814, considering the responses of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Francis Jeffrey and Charles Lamb. This historicized discussion is then balanced by a reading of the poem at the compositional stage, looking at the emergence from the manuscripts of a Wordsworthian dramatic voice. The author goes on to argue that the poem's philosophy is performative-that is, concerned with the way in which moral ideas can best be communicated, as much as with the ideas themselves. She then shifts her attention to consider how this operates in relation to the reader, considering the importance of context in relation to emotional response. Later, the epitaphic books are reconsidered in the light of Wordworth's critical writing; Bushell argues that the significance of the epitaph for him lies in its values as a poetic form in which the text itself is released from poetic authority. Finally, the author looks back at The Prelude from the perspective of The Excursion and shows how the later poem attempts to value the ordinary, rather than the poetic, mind. The conclusion reached is that Wordsworth is not just the "egotistical" poet of The Prelude, interested largely in the development of his own imaginative powers, but one who goes on to explore the limits of subjectivity and the importance of different kinds of imaginative links between individuals.
Author: Kate Singer
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438475276
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Examines the concept of a poetics of vacancy in Romantic-era literature. Romantic Vacancy argues that, at the cult of sensibility’s height, Romantic writers found alternative tropes of affect to express movement beyond sensation and the body. Grappling with sensibility’s claims that sensation could be translated into ideas and emotions, poets of vacancy rewrote core empiricist philosophies that trapped women and men in sensitive bodies and, more detrimentally, in ideological narratives about emotional response that gendered subjects’ bodies and minds. Kate Singer contends that affect’s genesis occurs instead through a series of figurative responses and movements that loop together human and nonhuman movements of mind, body, and nature into a posthuman affect. This book discovers a new form of Romantic affect that is dynamically linguistic and material. It seeks to end the long tradition of holding women and men writers of the Romantic period as separate and largely unequal. It places women writers at the forefront of speculative thinking, repositions questions of gender at the vanguard of Romantic-era thought, revises how we have long thought of gender in the period, and rewrites our notions of Romantic affect. Finally, it answers pivotal questions facing both affect studies and Romanticism about interrelations among language, affect, and materiality. Readers will learn more about the deep history of how poetic language can help us move beyond binary gender and its limiting intellectual and affective ideologies. “Romantic Vacancy is a formidable text for our time. Providing a nuanced and original account of Romanticism’s reconfiguration of affect, Singer not only opens up new ways of thinking about literature of the past; her detailed argument for complex poetic explorations of what it means to be a self, create challenges for the present, especially through the intimate relation between text and affect. This book is essential for anyone working in literary Romanticism, but will also be valuable for those interested in the complex literary history of affect.” — Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University Praise for Romantic Vacancy “For some time now there has been what we might call a movement that attends in Romantic writing to affects and states of being we had previously neglected or simply missed altogether. A generation of scholars, junior and senior, is mapping out this uncharted territory in the most original manner, along the way teaching us how to be with Romanticism, and how Romanticism has always been with us, in ways that are teaching all of us in turn how to be with the present. We can put Kate Singer’s Romantic Vacancy—smart, insightful, beautifully argued—at the vanguard of this movement, proof of the fact that any rumours of the death of our field are not only highly exaggerated but just plain wrong.” — Joel Faflak, author of Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery “Romantic Vacancy offers compelling close readings of Romantic women poets and two canonical male poets (Shelley and Wordsworth). After reading this book, Romantic-era scholars will no longer be able to read these poets in the same way again—I think this book will be a game changer for scholars working on women poets. This is a very fine work that should have a significant influence on the field.” — Daniela Garofalo, author of Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism
Author: James O. Pawelski
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611475287
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
In much of the critical discourse of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, scholars employed suspicion in order to reveal a given text's complicity with various undesirable ideologies and/or psychopathologies. Construed as such, interpretive practice was often intended to demystify texts and authors by demonstrating in them the presence of false consciousness, bourgeois values, patriarchy, orientalism, heterosexism, imperialist attitudes, and/or various neuroses, complexes, and lacks. While it proved to be of vital importance in literary studies, suspicious hermeneutics often compelled scholars to interpret eudaimonia, or well-being variously conceived, in pathologized terms. At the end of the twentieth century, however, literary scholars began to see the limitations of suspicion, conceived primarily as the discernment of latent realities beneath manifest illusions. In the last decade, often termed the "post-theory era," there was a radical shift in focus, as scholars began to recognize the inapplicability of suspicion as a critical framework for discussions of eudaimonic experiences, seeking out several alternative forms of critique, most of which can be called, despite their differences, a hermeneutics of affirmation. In such alternative reading strategies scholars were able to explore configurations of eudaimonia, not by dismissing them as bad politics or psychopathology but in complex ways that have resulted in a new eudaimonic turn, a trans-disciplinary phenomenon that has also enriched several other disciplines. The Eudaimonic Turn builds on such work, offering a collection of essays intended to bolster the burgeoning critical framework in the fields of English, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies by stimulating discussions of well-being in the "post-theory" moment. The volume consists of several examinations of literary and theoretical configurations of the following determinants of human subjectivity and the role these play in facilitating well-being: values, race, ethics/morality, aesthetics, class, ideology, culture, economics, language, gender, spirituality, sexuality, nature, and the body. Many of the authors compelling refute negativity bias and pathologized interpretations of eudaimonic experiences or conceptual models as they appear in literary texts or critical theories. Some authors examine the eudaimonic outcomes of suffering, marginalization, hybridity, oppression, and/or tragedy, while others analyze the positive effects of positive affect. Still others analyze the aesthetic response and/or the reading process in inquiries into the role of language use and its impact on well-being, or they explore the complexities of strength, resilience, and other positive character traits in the face of struggle, suffering, and "othering."
Author: William Keach
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140087324X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
This book explores previously unexamined links between the arbitrary as articulated in linguistic theories on the one hand, and in political discourse about power on the other. In particular, Willam Keach shows how Enlightenment conceptions of the arbitrary were contested and extended in British Romantic writing. In doing so, he offers a new paradigm for understanding the recurrent problem of verbal representation in Romantic writing and the disputes over stylistic performance during this period. With clarity and force, Keach reads these phenomena in relation to a rapidly shifting literary marketplace and to the social pressures in Britain generated by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the class antagonisms that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre. The question of what it means to think of language or politics as arbitrary persists through postmodern thinking, and this book advances an unfinished dialogue between Romantic culture and the critical techniques we currently use to analyze it. Keach's intertwined linguistic and political account of arbitrary power culminates in a detailed textual analysis of the language of revolutionary violence. Including substantial sections on Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. B. Shelley, Keats, and Anna Jameson, Arbitrary Power will engage not only students and scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature but also those interested in critical and linguistic theory and in social and political history.
Author: Heather Dubrow
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801887048
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
As a literary mode 'lyric' is difficult to define precisely. This text confronts widespread assumptions about lyric, exploring such topics as its relationship to its audiences, the impact of material conditions of production and other cultural pressures, and lyric's negotiations of gender.
Author: Jeffrey Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521430399
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Narrative features such as frames, digressions, or authorial intrusions have traditionally been viewed as distractions from or anomalies in the narrative proper. In Theory and the Novel Jeffrey Williams exposes these elements as more than simple disruptions, analysing them as registers of narrative reflexivity, that is, moments that represent and advertise the functioning of narrative itself. Williams argues that narrative encodes and advertises its own functioning and modal form. He takes a range of novels from the English canon - Tristram Shandy, Joseph Andrews, The Turn of the Screw, Wuthering Heights, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness are amongst the novels examined - and shows how narrative technique is never beyond or outside plot. He poses a series of theoretical questions such as about reflexitivity, imitation and fictionality, to offer a striking and original contribution to readings of the English novel, as well as to discussions of theory in general.
Author: Philip Cox
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719042645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
This book offers new insights into the ambiguous masculinity within male romantic poetry, discussing the work of Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge, among others.
