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

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312176554 ISBN 13: 9780312176556

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Synopsis

Countering established views that Wordsworth and his contemporaries evasively view the actual world through the idealizing imagination, Wiley (English, U. of North Florida) provides a fresh materialistic model of Romantic displacement by returning the term to its spatial and geographical roots. He argues that while 18th century social and political groups contested spaces through maps and geographical writings, Wordsworth's landscapes reconfigured institutional representations of the land and posited critical alternatives to them. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

About this title

About the Author:

MICHAEL WILEY is Lecturer in English at DePaul University in Chicago, USA.

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• ISBN 10: 0312176554
• ISBN 13: 9780312176556
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 212