Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women

Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women
Author: Judith W. Page
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1994-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780520084933

"Both Romanticists and feminists will welcome this original focus on Wordsworth's shifting attitude to gender, as well as the detailed and genuinely fresh reading of specific poems that it produces. This is the first full-length study to consider the role of the domestic in Wordsworth's poetry as well as the first to recognize the all-important role played in his later poetry by his relationship with his daughter Dora. It is an extremely important contribution to Wordsworth studies which challenges all the received wisdom concerning Wordsworth's poetic development and the role of gender in his writing."--Anne K. Mellor, author of "Romanticism and Gender" "An original contribution to romantic studies and one whose publication is most welcome. Its central thesis--that Wordsworth's relationships to the numerous women in his life are of crucial importance to the understanding of his poetry and politics--extends the concerns of earlier commentators in new and thoughtful ways. Steering a careful and compelling middle course between the apologists and the prosecutors, Page reconstructs Wordsworth's conflicted relationship to passion--sexual, political, and familial--as that relationship evolves over his long career."--Bradford K. Mudge, author of "Sara Coleridge: A Victorian Daughter"

Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women

Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women
Author: Judith W. Page
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2024-03-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520311221

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 Making extensive use of family letters, journals, and other documents, as well as unpublished material by the poet's daughter Dora Wordsworth, Page presents Wordsworth as a poet not defined primarily by egotistical sublimity but by his complicated and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 Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth

The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth
Author: Stephen Gill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2003-06-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139825887

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, while other chapters focus on the origin of his poetry and on the challenges it presented and continues to present. Further contributions include discussions of The Prelude and The Recluse, Wordsworth as philosophic poet, his writing in relation to European Romanticism, and Wordsworth as Nature poet. The collection, by an international team of established specialists concludes with a lucid account of the history of Wordsworth's texts, and offers students invaluable reference material including a chronology and guides to further reading.The volume aims to ensure that its readers will be grounded in the history of Wordsworth's career and his critical reception.

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850
Author: Devoney Looser
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2008-08-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0801887054

This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century. Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser finds that far from fading into moribund old age, female literary greats such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Porter toiled for decades after they achieved acclaim -- despite seemingly concerted attempts by literary gatekeepers to marginalize their later contributions. Though these remarkable women wrote and published well into old age, Looser sees in their late careers the necessity of choosing among several different paths. These included receding into the background as authors of "classics," adapting to grandmotherly standards of behavior, attempting to reshape masculinized conceptions of aged wisdom, or trying to create entirely new categories for older women writers. In assessing how these writers affected and were affected by the culture in which they lived, and in examining their varied reactions to the prospect of aging, Looser constructs careful portraits of each of her Subjects and explains why many turned toward retrospection in their later works. In illuminating the powerful and often poorly recognized legacy of the British women writers who spurred a marketplace revolution in their earlier years only to find unanticipated barriers to acceptance in later life, Looser opens up new scholarly territory in the burgeoning field of feminist age studies.

Behind the Scenes

Behind the Scenes
Author: Adrian Woods Frazier
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1990-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780520065499

"The archival material presented here is important and well-researched, Frazier's writing is lucid and dignified, and the story that unfolds is also exceedingly funny. The comedy is not laid on, it is all there in the material itself. Frazier is simply the first to bring it out."--Malcolm Brown, author of The Politics of Irish Literature