From preface: This study seeks to give a perspective on Wordsworth's achievement in sonnet, taking into account all the sonnets he wrote, from the outburst of sonneteering in 1802 to the final decade (1840-1850). My chief concern has been to trace Wordsworth's handling of form and theme throughout his poetic career. A subordinate but related concern has been to try to show that Wordsworth's powers do not diminish after 1815, a date which is sometimes regarded as marking the beginning of the poet's "decline" ~ Wordsworth’s skill in blank verse and in other types of lyric is widely acknowledged; his dexterity in the sonnet form is less well recognized or thought to be limited to fewer poems (usually those of the earlier years) than there actually are. As a result, his performance in sonnet is sometimes underestimated, there being more sonnet concerns and structural patterns than the well-known few reflect. It is possible that Wordsworth's own ambiguous attitude to the genre as expressed in his prose writings, together with his insistence that his sonnets were not amongst the best of his poems, has helped to foster such a view. His practice in sonnet, however, proves that his genius is as evident in some of these poems as it is elsewhere, whether he esteemed them less or not.

No description available.

No description available.

The purpose of this thesis is to show, through a study of the letters and a comparison of the journals and poems, the extent of the influence of Dorothy Wordsworth on the poetry of William Wordsworth and to bring together for the first time evidence of her influence.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, September 2009. / Restricted until 2nd September 2014.

This dissertation is a study of the romantic elements in Bernard Malamud's fiction that can be seen as representing a romantic ideology closely related to the romanticism of William Wordsworth.

No description available.

The aim of this thesis is to elucidate the relationship between the picturesque and the emergence of British national identity. It explores Scottish travel writings from the 1770s to the early nineteenth century, in order to examine the ways in which tourists employ the discourse of the picturesque to imagine the British nation. The introduction sets out the questions this thesis attempts to address and defines the scope of discussion. It also outlines the general arguments surrounding the picturesque and specifies the way in which picturesque descriptions of Scotland during the period will be approached. Chapter One examines the writings of early tourists to Scotland such as Thomas Pennant, Samuel Johnson and William Gilpin. Scotland's association with Jacobitism prevents Pennant and Johnson from perceiving the region as an integral part of the British nation and also prevents them from appreciating the natural beauty of Scotland. This chapter shows how Gilpin assimilates Scotland's historical distinctiveness to his idea of picturesque beauty. Chapter Two surveys the description of landscape by tourists who are particularly interested in the economic improvement of Scotland. The 1770s and 1780s in Scotland are marked by various endeavours to assimilate the region to the system of capitalist economy. The main interest of this chapter lies in the correspondence between picturesque discourse and contemporary economic discourse, and its attempt to elucidate the ways in which the picturesque helps the development of commercial society to appear as a natural process. Chapter Three investigates the relationship between women's taste for the picturesque and their sense of citizenship. In particular, it focusses on Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland. The Recollections demonstrates how Dorothy appropriates the picturesque to define her identity, and suggests that the equivocal quality of women's picturesque language in some ways corresponds to their ambivalent status in modem commercial society. Chapter Four concludes this inquiry into the picturesque's nation-projecting function by an examination of Walter Scott's idea of the picturesque. His first novel, Waverley, shows how he employs the picturesque to articulate his historical sense of Britishness. This chapter illustrates how Scott uses his literary fictions to propagate a picturesque image of the British nation among the general public.

Together Dorothy and William translate. a simple tour into aesthetic loveliness To his sister the journey was the juxtaposition of impoverished society and pastoral elegance. To Wordsworth the tour was a reawakening of poetic Impulse. Through his intense feeling for natural beauty, Wordsworth became the poet of all mankind..

My thesis depicts the crisis of self-legitimation that has accompanied the onset of modern hermeneutics, with its historicised and organicised version of the Enlightenment's 'universal perspective.' In this it follows the lead of the contemporary hermeneuticist Hans- Georg Gadamer in resuscitating the notion of prejudice, but contrasts it with Hannah Arendt's discussion of the human condition. She implicitly locates the problem in modern hermeneutics, the aporia, in the very philosophy of life that Gadamer embraces as its solution. Gadamer confuses the task of the humanities as a search for truth with what it ought to be, a search for meaning. I begin with his depiction of Kant's attack on the sensus communis; I conclude with an examination of the consequences of this attack on the orientation and interpretative practices of current schools of literary criticism with specific reference to Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn. In the central chapter, I focus upon Coleridge's attack on Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) in the Bioeraphia Literaria, reading it as a fundamental defence of prejudice based on the very fact that man has been made in imago Dei. The consequent logocentricity of humanity that Coleridge insists upon opposes Wordsworth's emphasis upon a transcendental idea of 'feeling.' This fundamental notion forms the basis of Coleridge's definition of the primary imagination. I argue the distinctiveness of his definition from that of the other Romantics and maintain its necessity to escape the aporia. This point is proved negatively by Shelley's Mont Blanc, which seizes upon the radical consequences of Wordsworth's poetics, presenting both heresy and obscurity in the poem. The word 'crisis' thus reflects the urgency with which I advocate the need to re-adopt Coleridge's emphases in contemporary literary criticism.