Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity: 79 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Series Number 79) - Softcover

Simpson, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1107403081 ISBN 13: 9781107403086

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2011

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

Review of the hardback: 'This is an accomplished scholarly monograph, the importance of which cannot be overstated. By locating Wordsworth's poetics at the very heart of modernity, Simpson revitalizes and recontextualizes a poet who has too long languished in the heritage-industry lumber-room of middle England.' Philological Quarterly

'David Simpson's gorgeously written, audacious study gives us a haunted Wordsworth, an occupant and observer of a modern capitalist world's 'ghost-ridden dark and twilight zones'.' Studies in Romanticism

Book Description

Leading critic David Simpson offers a reading of Wordsworth's poetry. Reading Wordsworth alongside Marx and Derrida, Simpson examines Wordsworth's extraordinary and original response to the massive changes in the condition of the modern world at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1107403081
• ISBN 13: 9781107403086
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 292