Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern

The Poetics of Modernity
Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-1-107-40308-6
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 79, 292 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 427 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in Romanticism

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Simpson, David

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.