Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism

Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism PDF Author: Eric C. Walker
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804760926
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
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.

Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism

Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism PDF Author: Eric C. Walker
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804760926
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure

Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure PDF Author: Alexander Freer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599046
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
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'.

Experimentalism in Wordsworth's Later Poetry

Experimentalism in Wordsworth's Later Poetry PDF Author: Tim Fulford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009320793
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
"Experimentalism in Wordsworth's Later Poetry Tim Fulford provides detailed readings of a range of little-known, late and difficult poems which together present an alternative Wordsworth to the one we are used to. This newly-revealed Wordsworth continued experimenting with form, genre and style as his career progressed so as to ponder the challenging experiences presented by later life. Fulford invites the reader to engage, through Wordsworth's poetry, with such broadly-felt concerns as quarantine, isolation, mental illness and bereavement. Focused yet broad in chronological scope, this study also considers the literature of Wordsworth's old age in relation to his earlier work. Tim Fulford is the author of many books and articles on the literature and history of the Romantic Period (1780-1840), and is the editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (2022). His monograph Wordsworth's Poetry 1815-45 (2019) won the Robert Penn Warren/Cleanth Brooks Award for Literary Scholarship 2020. His edition The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy (co-edited with Sharon Ruston) (2020) won an honourable mention in the MLA biennial Morton N. Cohen Award For A Distinguished Edition Of Letters"--

Wordsworth's Vagrants

Wordsworth's Vagrants PDF Author: Quentin Bailey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134782276
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Wordsworth's Vagrants explores the poet's treatment of the 'idle and disorderly' in the context of the penal laws of the 1790s, when the terror of the French Revolution caused a crackdown on the beggars and vagrants who roamed the English countryside. From his work on the Salisbury Plain poems through to the poetry about vagrants, beggars, and lunatics in Lyrical Ballads, Quentin Bailey argues, Wordsworth attempted to imagine a way of relating to the vagrant and criminal poor that could challenge the systematizing impulses of William Pitt and Jeremy Bentham. Whereas writers had previously relied on sensibility and fellow-feeling to reveal the correct ordering of society, Wordsworth was writing in a period in which legislators, magistrates, and commentators agreed that a more aggressively interventionist approach and new institutional solutions were needed to tackle criminality and establish a disciplined and obedient workforce. Wordsworth's interest in individual psychology and solitude, Bailey suggests, grew out of his specific awareness of the Bloody Code and the discussions surrounding it. His study offers a way of reading Wordsworth's poetry that is sensitive to his early radicalism but which does not equate socio-political engagement solely with support for the French Revolution.

Wordsworth's Ethics

Wordsworth's Ethics PDF 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.

Impure Conceits

Impure Conceits PDF Author: Alison Hickey
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804729710
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
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.

Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845

Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845 PDF Author: Tim Fulford
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812250818
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
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 Revisitings

Wordsworth's Revisitings PDF Author: Stephen Gill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199268770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In this beautifully written and thoughtful book Wordsworth's biographer and editor Stephen Gill explores the ways in which the poet attempted as an artist to maintain continuities through all the stages of his life and shows how revisitings of various kinds are at the heart of his creativity.

Wordsworth’s Trauma and Poetry

Wordsworth’s Trauma and Poetry PDF Author: Richard E. Matlak
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040035574
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Based upon the testimony of Thomas Carlyle, most biographers acknowledge that Wordsworth witnessed the beheading of the journalist Antoine Gorsas in October 1793 during the Reign of Terror. But they go no further. This study reads the Poet’s reactions to the Terror in passages from The Prelude as explicitly about his twenty-three-year-old-self witnessing the gory deaths of Gorsas and others, which caused post-traumatic stress disorder and its symptoms, exacerbated by guilt for abandoning his French lover and their child a year earlier. Following a chronological arc from October 1793, when the trauma began, until its conclusion in October 1803, when Wordsworth became a poet-soldier, I examine poetic works from The Borderers (1796), the “Discharged Soldier’ (1798), the Two-Part Prelude (1799), Home at Grasmere (1800), and the Liberty sonnets (1803), to follow the Poet working through anxiety, fear, and remorse to a resolution.

On War

On War PDF Author: Carl von Clausewitz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military art and science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description