Wordsworth's Reading 1770-1799

Wordsworth's Reading 1770-1799
Author: Duncan Wu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1993-01-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521416000

A directory of authors and books read by Wordsworth before the age of thirty.

Wordsworth's Reading 1800-1815

Wordsworth's Reading 1800-1815
Author: Duncan Wu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521496742

A comprehensive 1996 listing of authors and books read by William Wordsworth during the years of his greatest poetry.

Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure

Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure
Author: Rowan Boyson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2012-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139851764

Ancient questions about the causes and nature of pleasure were revived in the eighteenth century with a new consideration of its ethical and political significance. Rowan Boyson reminds us that philosophers of the Enlightenment, unlike modern thinkers, often represented pleasure as shared rather than selfish, and she focuses particularly on this approach to the philosophy and theory of pleasure. Through close reading of Enlightenment and Romantic texts, in particular the poetry and prose of William Wordsworth, Boyson elaborates on this central theme. Covering a wide range of texts by philosophers, theorists and creative writers from over the centuries, she presents a strong defence of the Enlightenment ideal of pleasure, drawing out its rich political, as well as intellectual and aesthetic, implications.

Wordsworth's Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception

Wordsworth's Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception
Author: Brian R Bates
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317322274

Wordsworth’s process of revision, his organization of poetic volumes and his supplementary writings are often seen as distinct from his poetic composition. Bates asserts that an analysis of these supplementary writings and paratexts are necessary to a full understanding of Wordsworth’s poetry.

Wordsworth's Classical Undersong

Wordsworth's Classical Undersong
Author: Richard Clancey
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2016-06-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230595758

Wordsworth's classical education presents an amazing paradox. Gifted teachers trained him in the full rigours of classical Latin and Greek. But Wordsworth's schoolmasters were enlightened, liberal and advanced. They were committed to the Classics and to modern literature. In their enthusiasm they shared their volumes of contemporary poetry with Wordsworth. His was a holistic literary education. Wordsworth developed a profound love for the Classics and thus an enlightened zeal for a new poetry, a poetry capable of being compared with and even daring to compete with the Classical texts he so dearly loved. Richard Clancey's meticulously researched study presents new biographical information on Wordsworth's classical education and new facts about the education of his teachers.

Wordsworth's Poetry and Prose (International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)

Wordsworth's Poetry and Prose (International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)
Author: William Wordsworth
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0393616924

The most accessible edition of Wordsworth’s poetry and prose, prepared to meet the needs of both students and scholars. This Norton Critical Edition presents a generous selection of William Wordworth’s poetry (including the thirteen-book Prelude of 1805) and prose works along with supporting materials for in-depth study. Together, the Norton Critical Editions of Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose and The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 are the essential texts for studying this author. Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose includes a large selection of texts chronologically arranged, thereby allowing readers to trace the author’s evolving interests and ideas. An insightful general introduction and textual introduction precede the texts, each of which is fully annotated. Illustrative materials include maps, manuscript pages, and title pages. “Criticism” collects thirty responses to Wordsworth’s poetry and prose spanning three centuries by British and American authors. Contributors include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Felicia Hemans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lucy Newlyn, Stephen Gill, Neil Fraistat, Mary Jacobus, Nicholas Roe, M. H. Abrams, Karen Swann, Michael O’Neill, and Geoffrey Hartman, among others. The volume also includes a Chronology, a Biographical Register, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles and First Lines of Poems.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 'the language of the heavens'

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 'the language of the heavens'
Author: Thomas Owens
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2019-05-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192577565

Thomas Owens explores some of the exultant visions inspired by Wordsworth's and Coleridge's close scrutiny of the night sky, the natural world, and the domains of science. He examines a set of scientific patterns drawn from natural, geometric, celestial, and astronomical sources which Wordsworth and Coleridge used to express their ideas about poetry, religion, literary criticism, and philosophy, and establishes the central importance of analogy in their creative thinking. Analogies prompted the poets' imaginings in geometry and cartography, in nature (representations of the moon) and natural history (studies of spider-webs, streams, and dew), in calculus and conical refraction, and in the discovery of infra-red and ultraviolet light. Although this is primarily a study of the patterns which inspired their writing, the findings overturn the prevalent critical consensus that Wordsworth and Coleridge did not have the access, interest, or capacity to understand the latest developments in nineteenth-century astronomy and mathematics, which they did in fact possess. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 'the language of the heavens' reinstates many relationships which the poets had with scientists and their sources. Most significantly, the book illustrates that these sources are not simply another context or historical lens through which to engage with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's work but are instead a controlling device of the symbolic imagination. Exploring the structures behind Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poems and metaphysics stakes out a return to the evidence of the Romantic imagination, not for its own sake, but in order to reveal that their analogical configuration of the world provided them with a scaffold for thinking, an intellectual orrery which ordered artistic consciousness and which they never abandoned.

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth
Author: Richard Gravil
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 978
Release: 2015-01-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191019658

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.

The Life of William Wordsworth

The Life of William Wordsworth
Author: John Worthen
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 535
Release: 2014-01-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 111860492X

By examining the family and financial circumstances of Wordsworth’s early years, this illuminating biography reshapes our understanding of the great Romantic poet’s most creative period of life and writing. Features new research into Wordsworth’s financial situation, and into how the poet and his family survived financially Offers a new understanding of the role of his great unwritten poem ‘The Recluse’ Presents a new assessment of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge