ENGLISH

Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity

By David Simpson

Book information

Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Year
2009
ISBN
0521898773, 9780521898775
LCC
PR5892.S58 S56 2009
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
1 MB (1369833 bytes)
Series
Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Edition
1
Pages
292\293
Topic
Education
Scanned
yes
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

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.

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