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Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern

The Poetics of Modernity

David Simpson author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:19th Feb '09

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Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern cover

David Simpson's reading of Wordsworth examines Wordsworth's reaction to changes in the modern world at the turn of the century.

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.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.

Review of the hardback: 'This is an accomplished scholarly monograph, the importance of which cannot be overstated. By locating Wordsworth's poetics at the very heart of modernity, Simpson revitalizes and recontextualizes a poet who has too long languished in the heritage-industry lumber-room of middle England.' Philological Quarterly
'David Simpson's gorgeously written, audacious study gives us a haunted Wordsworth, an occupant and observer of a modern capitalist world's 'ghost-ridden dark and twilight zones'.' Studies in Romanticism

ISBN: 9780521898775

Dimensions: 235mm x 160mm x 20mm

Weight: 600g

292 pages