Wordsworth and the Composition of Knowledge: Refiguring Relationships Among Minds, Worlds, and Words (Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 15)

Sullivan, Brad

ISBN 10: 0820448575 / ISBN 13: 9780820448572

Published by Peter Lang Publishing, 2000

About this Item

2000 hardcover published without jacket/cover is bent/wear & bumping on the cover/clean & unmarked. 202 p.

Seller Inventory # ABE-1729088915551

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Wordsworth and the Composition of Knowledge: Refiguring Relationships Among Minds, Worlds, and Words (Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 15)
• Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0820448575
• ISBN 13: 9780820448572
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket

About this title

Synopsis

To understand and value Wordsworth’s efforts to make poetry a tool of cultural intervention, critics must, like him, struggle with the Cartesian dualisms that dominate Western culture. Drawing on a number of interdisciplinary sources, including classical rhetoricians Isocrates and Quintilian, and twentieth-century scientists Gregory Bateson and Antonio Damasio, this study develops a coherent framework for understanding Wordsworth’s efforts to refigure the relationships that constitute knowing. Sullivan argues that Wordsworth sketched out an «ecology of mind» in which perception, feeling, thinking, and acting were related in a continuum of mental processes, and in which individual minds had a mutually shaping, integrative relationship with larger mind-like processes (particularly «Nature»). This study also shows how this «ecology of mind» can offer significant insight to learners in the twenty-first century.

About the Author

The Author: Brad Sullivan is Polling Institute Director and Associate Professor of English at Western New England College. He received his Ph.D. in English literature, with a cognate in Rhetoric and Composition from Ball State University. He has published articles on Robert Frost and Christina Rossetti.