Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern
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.
- Major book on Wordsworth by leading critic David Simpson
- Reading of Wordsworth's poetry focusing on the link between poetic rhetoric and socio-historical development
- Careful reading of Wordsworth alongside Marx and Derrida showing links between poetry and the conditions of modernity
Reviews & endorsements
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 Romanticism
Product details
April 2009Adobe eBook Reader
9780511501197
0 pages
0kg
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- 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.