The Time of Unrememberable Being: Wordsworth and the Sublime, 1787-1805 - Hardcover

Mortensen, Klaus P

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8772894431 ISBN 13: 9788772894430

Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1998

Synopsis

This study views the early work of William Wordsworth as partaking in a general Western European cultural movement in which the realm of the numinous is translocated from heaven to earth -- grand Nature -- and from there further on into Man's inner Nature. In this metaphysical implosion the concept of the Sublime gradually comes to signify the mental, godlike powers of Man.

About this title

Product Description

This volume aims to introduce new aspects into the Anglo-Saxon discussion of the oeuvre of William Wordsworth, thereby contributing to the current international consideration both of Romanticism as a universal cultural phenomenon and of the genesis of the Romantic movement. As for this latter element, the book is an indirect rebuttal of the deconstructivist view of Romanticism.

Synopsis

This volume aims to introduce new aspects into the Anglo-Saxon discussion of the oeuvre of William Wordsworth, thereby contributing to the current international consideration both of Romanticism as a universal cultural phenomenon and of the genesis of the Romantic movement. As for this latter element, the book is an indirect rebuttal of the deconstructivist view of Romanticism. On the one hand, the book places Wordsworth's early work in an overall framework of literary history by considering it as an answer to the new departure represented by the Romantic movement. In this connection, it introduces the concept of the metaphysical implosion, which it expands in an outline of the widely ramified process of cultural history in which the sphere reserved in the Christian tradition for the divine, the numinous, is in the course of the 18th century removed from heaven to Earth: first to the grand phenomena of nature and subsequently to the expansive, visionary and creative potential of human consciousness expressed in "The Sublime".

On the other hand, through a close reading in chronological order of a number of key texts from 1787-1805, the book seeks to allow the "little" history of the oeuvre to throw an explanatory light back on the great intellectual history of which it is part. It thus follows in detail the way in which Wordsworth achieves an epoch-making transformation of current conceptions of the sublime and, thereby, creates a profoundly original version of the Romantic project in which he seeks to remove the distinction between subject and object, consciousness and nature not merely by asserting, but in the actual poetical process of creating metaphor by living up to this vision of unity (in a quite concrete sense in visions of sublime, grand and reflected landscapes). The essence in this poetical work is the conception of the imagination which Wordsworth reaches in 1798, and on which he builds a series of epoch-making works within a very short period of time.

According to Wordsworth, the poetical ability of form images is nature's formula in early childhood, in addition to language and the child's consciousness of itself as an independent being, "the time of unrememberable being", as he calls this phase of life in a hiterto unobserved fragment from 1798. At the same time, the book shows how and why this idea is slowly undermined until it disintegrates about 1804-05, when Wordsworth's work takes a completely different direction.

Edition details

• Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8772894431
• ISBN 13: 9788772894430
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208