Wordsworth and the Passions of Critical Poetics

This scholarly study presents a new political Wordsworth: an artist interested in 'autonomous' poetry's redistribution of affect. No slave of Whig ideology, Wordsworth explores emotion for its generation of human experience and meaning. He renders poetry a critical instrument that, through acute feeling, can evaluate public and private life.

List of contents

Introduction: Poetry, Feeling and Criticism Shaftesbury, Wordsworth and Affective Critique Burke, Wordsworth and the Poet Poetry and the Liberty of Feeling Wordsworth's Ear and the Place of Aesthetic Autonomy Poetry and Embodiment Melancholy and Affirmation Conclusion

About the author

STUART ALLEN is Assistant Professor of English at Bridgewater State College, Massachusetts, USA. He has published articles on Wordsworth, Romanticism and James Joyce.

Summary

This scholarly study presents a new political Wordsworth: an artist interested in 'autonomous' poetry's redistribution of affect. No slave of Whig ideology, Wordsworth explores emotion for its generation of human experience and meaning. He renders poetry a critical instrument that, through acute feeling, can evaluate public and private life.

Additional text

"Wordsworth's push and pull through emotional turbulence to conciliatory consciousness, alienation into affection, is sharply explored by Allen throughout the study and his simultaneous focus on the aesthetic, political, affective and material through both historical philosophy and modern theory keeps the book lively and percipient throughout." - Emma Mason, Warwick University, UK

Report

"Wordsworth's push and pull through emotional turbulence to conciliatory consciousness, alienation into affection, is sharply explored by Allen throughout the study and his simultaneous focus on the aesthetic, political, affective and material through both historical philosophy and modern theory keeps the book lively and percipient throughout." - Emma Mason, Warwick University, UK

Product details

• Authors: S Allen, S. Allen
• Publisher: Palgrave UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 14.01.2014
• EAN: 9781349320431
• ISBN: 978-1-349-32043-1
• No. of pages: 214
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; B, Poetry, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: poetry & poets, Literature: history & criticism, Literary studies: general, Literary theory, Poetry and Poetics, European Literature, Literature, Modern—19th century, Nineteenth-Century Literature, British literature, British and Irish Literature, Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, Palgrave Literature Collection, Literature—Philosophy, Early Modern and Renaissance Literature, Literature, Modern, critique;poetics;poetry;William Wordsworth;Wordsworth