Wordsworth and Helen Maria Williams; or, the Perils of Sensibility , livre ebook

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2021

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Richard Gravil

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124

pages

English

Ebook

2021

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Humanities eBooks

Date de parution

11 janvier 2021

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9781847600943

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

A study of Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams and Sensibility, and the effect of this literary liaison on his contemporary reputation.

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Publié par

Humanities eBooks

Date de parution

11 janvier 2021

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9781847600943

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

European Literary criticism

Wordsworth and Helen Maria Williams; or, the Perils of Sensibility Three Grasmere Essays

Richard Gravil

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Wordsworth and Helen Maria Williams; or, the Perils of Sensibility Three Grasmere Essays

Richard Gravil

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Contents

Preface

Introduction: Williams and Wordsworth, an Odyssey

1. Wordsworth’s Revolutionary Anima ‘A Region of Romance’ ‘Domestic carnage’ ‘Come now, ye golden times’ 2. An Affair of Sensibility Twilight Tears Affective elements inThe PreludeA language for the sense of aftermath Wordsworth and the Sensibility Sonnet 3. Wordsworth (Fox) and Jeffrey: ‘Namby-Pamby’, or the Shock of the New? Poems, in Two Volumesand Charles James Fox Francis Jeffrey on Wordsworth Wordsworth Unmanned; or, the cost of criticism Helen Maria Williams: a Select Bibliography

Appendix: Textual Echoes

16 16 30 33 41 41 56 59 65

73 73 81 100 109

111

Preface

The chapters in this volume are developed from lectures given at the Wordsworth Summer Conference and Winter School in 2007 and 2008. The talks were not initially conceived as a series, and the three chapters might have appeared in any order. It would have made sense to begin with Helen Maria Williams’s earliest inuence on William Wordsworth, then look in detail at the relationship between their accounts of the French Revolution, and close by glancing at the damage done to his critical reputation by hisliaison dangereuxwith feminine sensibility as demonstrated inPoems in Two Volumes. Or I could have opened with the celebrated matter of Jeffrey’s handling of bothLyrical Balladsand thePoems in Two Volumesand then con-sidered what it was in Wordsworth’s poetic allegiances that tempted him to betray so much ‘feminine’ sensibility in his ‘Pansies’ as one might call them, and why the impact of so much sensibility had the effect of thrusting the admitted ‘manliness’ of the political sonnets into the background. It seemed, on balance, best to open with the grand historical topos of ‘human nature seeming born again’, as encountered îrst by a female historian and then a male poet; to go on by examining other traces of the former’s work and sensibility to be found in the latter; and to conclude (with what was, in fact the îrst lecture) by wonder-ing whether it was these traces of ‘feminine’ sensibility, or ‘effemi-nacy’, by the standards of the day, that drew down upon one hap-less lake poet the scorn of Edinburgh. Complete reconstruction of the approach in the îrst two chapters proved to be beyond my skill, so the chapters do treat some elements of the story of Wordsworth and Williams, especially as regards their experience of France, twice over, though with different emphases. The package is, to my mind, held together by this matter of (as I would have it) ungendered poetic sensibility. Apart from anything

Wordsworth and Sensibility

of value that I might be found to be saying about Wordsworth and Williams, or indeed Wordsworth and Jeffrey, the one thing I would most like to register is the wrongness of Coleridge’s famous assertion that Wordsworth’s personality was entirely masculine—that there was nothing feminine in his nature. Parts of chapter 1 are making their fourth appearance. A version of it was published inThe Wordsworth Circle, 40:1 (Winter 2009), and in it I drew on an article îrst published in 1989, in the French Revolution volume of theYearbook of English Studies, edited by J. R. Watson, which Stephen Gill has also seen ît to resurrect in his Oxford ‘Casebooks in Criticism’ collection onThe Prelude(2006). But I have avoided the temptation to draw too much upon a rele-vant chapter on ‘“The Milder day”: or, Manliness and Minstrelsy’ in Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation(2003).

Helen Maria Williams, by Ozias Humphrey, 1792

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