Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces (Romanticism in Perspective:Texts, Cultures, Histories) - Hardcover

Wiley, M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333718909 ISBN 13: 9780333718902

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Synopsis

Romantic Geography offers a Wordsworth who engages fully with the political and social concerns of post French Revolutionary Great Britain.
Countering established views that Wordsworth and his contemporaries evasively displace the actual world through the idealizing imagination, Michael Wiley provides a fresh materialist model of Romantic displacement by returning the term to its spatial and geographical roots. Eighteenth-century social and political groups contested spaces through maps, travel literature, topographical descriptions and other geographical writings. In this context, Wiley argues, Wordsworth's landscapes reconfigure institutional representations of the land, positing critical alternatives to them.
This argument is grounded in the historical sources of Wordsworth's poetry and is informed by recent work in cultural, sociological and geographical studies. Romantic Geography provides fresh insights into some of Wordsworth's most hotly disputed texts. It is important reading for those working in the field of Romanticism and the fast-growing field of spatial studies.

About this title

Review:

Romantic Poetry influenced some of the Victorian geographers, as David Craig showed in Native Stones. And Romantic aesthietics, it could be argued, aided the subjection of place to space, helped abstract the local into a universal scheme. But this is not the argument of Michael Wiley's excellent book...Wiley is a perceptive and persuasive close-reader of poetry...Throughout, he quietly and impressively demonstrates how Wordsworth's lines resonated in the particular contexts of their times...Always clear, often elegant, Wiley throws shafts of light on Home at Grasmere, the 1802 sonnets, The Excursion and Tintern Abbey....he resists eary generalisation and provides the kind of unexpected detail that refocues debate...Not least among the virtues of Wiley's enjoyable book is its modest reminder that events other than the French Revolution shaped the politics and aesthtics of Romanticism.' - Fim Fulford, The Wordsworth Circle

'His book is an important contribution to the critical effort to re-situate Wordsworth in his historical and political context.' - John Haydn Baker, Times Literary Supplement

Synopsis:

This work aims to illuminate the nexus between imaginative literature and geography in William Wordsworth's poetry and prose. It shows that 18th-century social and political interest groups contested spaces through maps, geographical commentaries and travel literature; and that by configuring "utopian" landscapes, Wordsworth himself participated in social and political controversies in post-French revolutionary England.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0333718909
• ISBN 13: 9780333718902
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 221