Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern
The Poetics of Modernity
1st Edition
Published on 10. April 2009
978-0-511-50119-7 (ISBN)
Description
This reading of Wordworth's poetry by leading critic David Simpson centres on its almost obsessive representation of spectral forms and images of death in life. Wordsworth is reacting, Simpson argues, to the massive changes in the condition of England and the modern world at the turn of the century: mass warfare; the increased scope of machine-driven labour and urbanisation; and the expanding power of commodity form in rendering economic and social exchange more and more abstract, more and more distant from human agency and control. Reading Wordsworth alongside Marx and Derrida, Simpson examines the genesis of an attitude of concern which exemplifies the predicament of modern subjectivity as it faces suffering and distress.
Reviews / Votes
Review of the hardback: 'This is an accomplished scholarly monograph, the importance of which cannot be overstated. By locating Wordsworth's poetics at the very heart of modernity, Simpson revitalizes and recontextualizes a poet who has too long languished in the heritage-industry lumber-room of middle England.' Philological Quarterly 'David Simpson's gorgeously written, audacious study gives us a haunted Wordsworth, an occupant and observer of a modern capitalist world's 'ghost-ridden dark and twilight zones'.' Studies in RomanticismMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Cambridge University Press
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
File size
1,80 MB
ISBN-13
978-0-511-50119-7 (9780511501197)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
02/2009
Cambridge University Press
€88.00
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
David Simpson is G. B. Needham Distinguished Professor of English, University of California-Davis.
Content
Introduction; 1. At the limits of sympathy; 2. At home with homelessness; 3. Figures in the mist; 4. Timing modernity: around 1800; 5. The ghostliness of things; 6. Living images, still lives; 7. The scene of reading.
