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

Simpson, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521898773 ISBN 13: 9780521898775

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2009

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

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.

About the Author

David Simpson is G. B. Needham Distinguished Professor of English, University of California-Davis.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521898773
• ISBN 13: 9780521898775
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 292