Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn: Community, Virtue, and Vision in the 1790s

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University of Delaware Press, 1997 - Literary Criticism - 273 pages
This book engages a controversy over the relationship between Wordsworth's poetry and his politics, dating back to the early reviews of the Lyrical Ballads. Rieder argues that Wordsworth's poetry achieves its power by projecting a fantasy of community that finds its material counterpart far more in the literature itself than in the rural occupations or natural scenes Wordsworth depicts. Also argued throughout is that Wordsworth's originality springs from his invention and elaboration of a peculiarly literary form of community.
 

Contents

Wordsworths Community of Recognition
13
Wordsworths Ethos Violence Alienation and MiddleClass Virtue
32
The Economy of Vision
59
Civic Virtue and Social Class at the Scene of Execution The Salisbury Plain Poems
91
The Politics of Theatricality and the Crime of Abandonment in The Borderers
108
Framing The Ruined Cottage
146
Therefore Am I Still The Poets Authority in Tintern Abbey
185
Originality Sympathy and the Critique of Ideology
221
The Versions of The Ruined Cottage
230
Notes
231
Works Cited
259
Index
269
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Page 17 - In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.

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