Wordsworth's profession : form, class, and the logic of early Romantic cultural production

著者

• Pfau, Thomas

書誌事項

Wordsworth's profession : form, class, and the logic of early Romantic cultural production

Thomas Pfau

Stanford University Press, 1997

注記

Includes bibliographical references (p. [429]-447) and index

内容説明・目次

内容説明

This book explores Wordsworth's professionalization as a writer in relation to the cultural and economic ascendancy of the English middle class between 1740 and 1820. Its wide-ranging interpretations are coordinated by a single, albeit highly ramified, critical hypothesis: that Romanticism's aesthetic forms simultaneously afforded the middle classes an imaginary furlough from the impinging consciousness of their tenuous socio-economic status. Wordsworth's Profession analyzes and correlates changing paradigms of authorship, poetic genre, and tone with the demographic and spiritual aspects of middle-class life during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first of three parts explores Wordsworth's early descriptive poetry (An Evening Walk, Descriptive Sketches, and "Tinturn Abbey") in relation to inherited and contiguous aesthetic forms and practices, such as the landscapes of Lorrain and Gainsborough, Kant's theory of aesthetic communities, and the institutions of domestic tourism and the Picturesque in late-eighteenth-century England. The second part addresses the construction of a distinctly middle-class paradigm of reading in Lyrical Ballads. It does so in relation to contemporary didactic fiction (Wollstonecraft), anti-didactic writing (Blake), speculative theories of education (Godwin, Coleridge, and Hegel), and the emergent so-called mutual tutor or "monitorial" systems of elementary schooling (Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster). The book's final part, on The Prelude, focuses on representations of middle-class moral and economic anxiety as mediated in the spirited debate about populousness and public morality. Seen in this context, Wordsworth's autobiography appears less a confession than an attempt to simulate poetic answers to questions lingering in the national unconscious, questions too vast and threatening to bear conscious asking.

目次

Introduction 1. Description: picturesque aesthetics and the production of the English Middle Class, 1730-1798 2. Instruction: romantic theories of elemental and cultural literacy and the Lyrical Ballads 3. Vocation: automimesis and the political economy of spirit and body in The Prelude Notes Bibliography Index.

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詳細情報

• NII書誌ID(NCID): BA37307864
• ISBN:
  • 0804729026
• LCCN: 97002946
• 出版国コード: us
• タイトル言語コード: eng
• 本文言語コード: eng
• 出版地: Stanford, Calif.
• ページ数/冊数: xii, 454 p.
• 大きさ: 24 cm
• 分類:
  • LCC : PR5886
  • DC21 : 821/.7
• 件名:
  • LCSH : Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850 -- Authorship
  • LCSH : Middle class -- England -- Books and reading -- History -- 18th century
  • LCSH : Middle class -- England -- Books and reading -- History -- 19th century
  • LCSH : Literature and society -- England -- History -- 18th century
  • LCSH : Literature and society -- England -- History -- 19th century
  • LCSH : Poetry -- Authorship -- History -- 19th century
  • LCSH : Aesthetics, British -- 18th century
  • LCSH : Aesthetics, British -- 19th century
  • LCSH : Romanticism -- England
  • LCSH : Picturesque, The
  • LCSH : Literary form