Download or read book William Wordsworth in Context written by Andrew Bennett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the essential contexts for an understanding of all aspects of the major English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth.
Download or read book William Wordsworth in Context written by Andrew Bennett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book William Wordsworth written by Stephen Gill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth written by Emma Mason and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Wordsworth s Vagrants written by Quentin Bailey and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 the Salisbury Plain poems through to Lyrical Ballads, Quentin Bailey's readings are sensitive to Wordsworth's early radicalism without equating his socio-political engagement solely with support for the French Revolution.
Download or read book Wordsworth s Historical Imagination Routledge Revivals written by David Simpson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-07 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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’.
Download or read book Deep Distresses written by Richard E. Matlak and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep Distresses is a study of the intersecting family and professional vicissitudes that afflicted Wordsworth during the period of his greatest poetic productivity. The negative national publicity over his mariner brother's death at sea is the focus of the family tragedy; hostile reception to Poems in Two Volumes (1807) is the focus of professional duress. Both topics become related through the intercession of the poet's patron, Sir George Beaumont, who attempts to ameliorate the family tragedy with money and his painting of Pecl Castle in a Storm, while hoping to groom Wordsworth for a place among the cultural elite of London. In its attention to nineteenth-century culture and business, this study offers an entirely new context for reading and re-interpreting many of Wordsworth's major works from Michael through the major lyrics of Poems in Two Volumes and the latter books of The Prelude. Richard E. Matlak is a Professor of English and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies at the College of the Holy Cross.
Download or read book William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship written by Scott Hess and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth written by Richard Gravil and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-01-22 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth's poetry, other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion, and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.
Download or read book I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud written by William Wordsworth and published by Lobster Press. This book was released on 2007-03 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The classic Wordsworth poem is depicted in vibrant illustrations, perfect for pint-sized poetry fans."
Download or read book William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty written by Dr Heidi J Snow and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth written by Stephen Gill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-06-12 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth provides a wide-ranging account of one of the most famous Romantic poets. Specially commissioned essays cover all the important aspects of this multi-faceted writer; the volume examines his poetic achievement with a chapter on poetic craft, other chapters focus on the origin of his poetry and on the challenges it presented and continues to present. The volume ensures that students will be grounded in the history of Wordsworth's career and his critical reception.
Download or read book The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth written by William Wordsworth and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth collects 31 letters that William Wordsworth exchanged with his wife, Mary, during the early years of their marriage. These letters--fifteen from William to Mary and sixteen from her to him--were written during William's absences from home in 1810 and 1812 and offer an entirely new way of looking at the poet and his married life. Reproduced here with an informative introduction and headnotes by Beth Darlington that set each missive in biographical context, the letters cover a wide range of topics: village life, Regency politics, poetry and painting, London gossip, rural manners, their five children, domestic activities, and family anecdotes. Yet along with these everyday incidents and practical concerns, there are tender passages in which the Wordsworths ardently declare their love for each other and reveal a profound happiness in their marriage.The William Wordsworth who emerges from this correspondence is a figure more relaxed, more accessible, and indeed more human that he has been pictured; May emerges as a woman of keen intelligence, energy, and imagination. Revealing how thoroughly Wordsworth shared his inner and passional life with Mary, this volume puts to rest the notion that theirs was a marriage of convenience.
Download or read book Impure Conceits written by Alison Hickey and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 systemsfamily narratives, property, education, and imperialismand 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.
Download or read book Horace s Ars Poetica written by Jennifer Ferriss-Hill and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major reinterpretation of Horace's famous literary manual For two millennia, the Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), the 476-line literary treatise in verse with which Horace closed his career, has served as a paradigmatic manual for writers. Rarely has it been considered as a poem in its own right, or else it has been disparaged as a great poet's baffling outlier. Here, Jennifer Ferriss-Hill for the first time fully reintegrates the Ars Poetica into Horace's oeuvre, reading the poem as a coherent, complete, and exceptional literary artifact intimately linked with the larger themes pervading his work. Arguing that the poem can be interpreted as a manual on how to live masquerading as a handbook on poetry, Ferriss-Hill traces its key themes to show that they extend beyond poetry to encompass friendship, laughter, intergenerational relationships, and human endeavor. If the poem is read for how it expresses itself, moreover, it emerges as an exemplum of art in which judicious repetitions of words and ideas join disparate parts into a seamless whole that nevertheless lends itself to being remade upon every reading. Establishing the Ars Poetica as a logical evolution of Horace's work, this book promises to inspire a long overdue reconsideration of a hugely influential yet misunderstood poem.
Download or read book Charles Darwin and the Church of Wordsworth written by Robert M. Ryan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Darwin and the Church of William Wordsworth is a study of the cultural connections between two of the nineteenth century's most influential figures, Charles Darwin and William Wordsworth. When Darwin published On the Origin of Species, his reading public's affective response to the natural world had already been profoundly influenced by William Wordsworth. Wordsworth presented nature as benign, harmonious, a source of moral inspiration and spiritual blessing, and a medium through which one might enter into communion with the Divine. Long after his death, he continued to be revered throughout the English-speaking world, not only as a great poet, but as a theologian with a broader following than any prelate and an appeal that transcended or ignored sectarian differences. For believers and skeptics alike, Wordsworth's poetry offered a readily accessible and intellectually respectable counterweight to Darwin's vision of a material universe evolving by fixed laws in which Divinity played no discernible role and where concepts like beauty and harmony were material conditions to be explained in scientific terms. Wordsworth's theology of nature became for many readers a more effective counterforce to Darwin's ideas than Biblical orthodoxy, but it also provided an enriching context for the reception of evolutionary theory, aiding theists in their effort to reach an accommodation with the new science. As the nineteenth century's two most prominent theoreticians of nature's life, Wordsworth and Darwin competed for attention among those seeking to understand humanity's relationship with the natural world, and their disciples engaged in a productive, mutually transformative dialogue in which the poet's cultural authority influenced the way Darwin was received, and Darwinian science adjusted interpretation and evaluation of the poetry. Charles Darwin and the Church of William Wordsworth explores the broad cultural relationship between Wordsworth, Darwin, and their disciples, contextualizing them within wider discussions about the relationship between religion and science in the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Wordsworth The Prelude written by Stephen Gill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-08-30 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gill places The Prelude in the context of Wordsworth's life, and discusses the various states in which it survives.
