Wordsworth''s Unremembered Pleasure

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.

List of contents

• Preface


• Introduction: Wordsworth after Freud


• 1: Unremembered Pleasure


• 2: The Infancy of Affection


• 3: Metrical Pleasures


• 4: Sustaining Elegy


• 5: Happiness in Time


• Conclusion


• Bibliography


• Index

About the author

Alexander Freer is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he teaches eighteenth-century and romantic literature. He studied at Warwick and at Christ's College, Cambridge, taught at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of essays on romantic poetry, poetics, and literary criticism.

Summary

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.

Additional text

Freer demonstrates especially moving, lyrical readings, where the consequences of his thinking seem to gesture beyond the specificity of the writing. [...] Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure ... demonstrates the extent to which our Romantic readings of the unnoticed can often produce powerful pleasures that wrestle with our appropriative glances and feelings, those we cast at a past that is not entirely ours to begin with but to which we feel complexly indebted.

Product details

• Authors: Alexander Freer, Alexander (Junior Research Fellow Freer
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 29.10.2020
• EAN: 9780198856986
• ISBN: 978-0-19-885698-6
• No. of pages: 272
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; English, LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, POETRY / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: poetry & poets, Literary theory, Literary studies: poetry and poets