Author: Alan GrobPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 454
Book Description
Wordsworth's Moral Universe
Author: Alan GrobWordsworth's Moral Universe
Author: Alan GrobWordsworth's Ethics
Author: Adam PotkayPublisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421417022
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
Book Description
A comprehensive examination that breathes new life into Wordsworth and the ethical concerns that were vital to his nineteenth-century readers. Why read Wordsworth’s poetry—indeed, why read poetry at all? Beyond any pleasure it might give, can it make one a better or more flourishing person? These questions were never far from William Wordsworth’s thoughts. He responded in rich and varied ways, in verse and in prose, in both well-known and more obscure writings. Wordsworth's Ethics is a comprehensive examination of the Romantic poet’s work, delving into his desire to understand the source and scope of our ethical obligations. Adam Potkay finds that Wordsworth consistently rejects the kind of impersonal utilitarianism that was espoused by his contemporaries James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in favor of a view of ethics founded in relationships with particular persons and things. The discussion proceeds chronologically through Wordsworth’s career as a writer—from his juvenilia through his poems of the 1830s and '40s—providing a valuable introduction to the poet’s work. The book will appeal to readers interested in the vital connection between literature and moral philosophy.
George Berkeley and Romanticism
Author: Chris TownsendPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192846787
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Book Description
George Berkeley's mainstream legacy amongst critics and philosophers, from Samuel Johnson to Bertrand Russell, has tended to concern his claim that the objects of perception are in fact nothing more than our ideas. Yet there's more to Berkeley than idealism alone, and the poets now grouped under the label 'Romanticism' took up Berkeley's ideas in especially strange and surprising ways. As this book shows, the poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley focused less on Berkeley's arguments for idealism than they did on his larger, empirically-derived claim that nature constitutes a kind of linguistic system. It is through that 'ghostly language' that we might come to know ourselves, each other, and even God. This book is a reappraisal of the role that Berkeley's ideas played in Romanticism, and it pursues his spiritualized philosophy across a range of key Romantic-period poems. But it is also a re-reading of Berkeley himself, as a thinker who was deeply concerned with language and with written--even literary--style. In that sense, it offers an incisive case study into the reception of philosophical ideas into the workings of poetry, and of the role of poetics within the history of ideas more broadly.
Fielding's novels. Cowper and Rousseau. The first Edinburgh reviewers. Wordsworth's ethics. Landor's imaginary conversations. Macaulay. Charlotte Brontë. Charles Kingsley. Godwin and Shelley
Author: Leslie StephenPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : English essays
Languages : en
Pages : 426
Book Description
William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation
Author: David P. HaneyPublisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271040610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
Fatal Autonomy
Author: William JewettPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501744526
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
'Fatal Autonomy is a subtle, gracefully written, and politically astute reading of selected plays by the canonical Romantic poets. Jewett offers the most original and carefully circumscribed formulations to date of the interaction between language and politics as it is depicted in Romantic drama.'—Julie Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara Describing an enduring moral puzzle and explaining how it helped to shape a key moment in the history of poetic drama, Fatal Autonomy represents Romanticism as a reckoning with the costs of individual agency. No moral calculus can ever fully determine the relation of events to an individual's actions and failures to act, William Jewett argues; that is why the stubborn belief in such a relationship gives rise to tragedy. Jewett maintains that tragic drama forces its readers and viewers to confront the ways in which the use of language grants agency. The Romantic poets saw a moral challenge in that confrontation and followed its generic implications toward a new kind of poetry. Fatal Autonomy thus looks to Romantic drama to explain how Romantic poetry came to hold a permanent grip on conceptions of moral life. Tracing the source of major strains in British Romanticism to a politically charged body of dramatic poems, Jewett focuses on two historical moments: 1794-97, which he describes as the political turning point in the careers of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and 1819-22, the years in which he believes Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron wrote their best poetry.
Professing Sincerity
Author: Susan B. RosenbaumPublisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813926100
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
Sincerity--the claim that the voice, figure, and experience of a first-person speaker is that of the author--has dominated both the reading and the writing of Anglo-American poetry since the romantic era. Most critical studies have upheld an opposition between sincerity and the literary marketplace, contributing to the widespread understanding of the lyric poem as a moral refuge from the taint of commercial culture. Guided by the question of why we expect poetry to be sincere, Susan Rosenbaum reveals in Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading that, in fact, sincerity in the modern lyric was in many ways a product of commercial culture. As she demonstrates, poets who made a living from their writing both sold the moral promise that their lyrics were sincere and commented on this conflict in their work. Juxtaposing the poetry of Wordsworth and Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Smith and Sylvia Plath, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Elizabeth Bishop, Rosenbaum shows how on the one hand, through textual claims to sincerity poets addressed moral anxieties about the authenticity, autonomy, and transparency of literature written in and for a market. On the other hand, by performing their "private" lives and feelings in public, she argues, poets marketed the self, cultivated celebrity, and advanced professional careers. Not only a moral practice, professing sincerity was also good business. The author focuses on the history of this conflict in both British romantic and American post-1945 poetry. Professing Sincerity will appeal to students and scholars of Anglo-American lyric poetry, of the history of authorship, and of gender studies and commercial culture.
What Good Are the Arts?
Author: John CareyPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199735972
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
A lively and stimulating invitation to debate the value of art offers a provocative study that will pique the interest of and inspire any reader who loves painting, music, or literature.
The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles
Author: M. SchneiderPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230613179
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Book Description
This book traces the musical and cultural achievements of this contemporary musical phenomenon to its origin in the Romantic revolution of the 1790's in England when traditional concepts of literature, politics, education and social relationships were challenged as they were in the 1960's.