This thesis is the first close study of Wordsworth and silence. It uncovers the comprehensive investigation into monastic history and hagiography (with special emphasis on St Basil) that Wordsworth engaged in between 1807 and 1810, showing that the type of silence he valued came from the monastic tradition. I trace Wordsworth’s material commitment to the power of silence through his use of hermit figures and his habit of visiting ruined monasteries. I concentrate on the poetry he composed from 1807 onwards and mark his eight-month residence in 1806-7 at the home of Sir George and Lady Beaumont as the locus at which his intensive interest in monasticism germinated. I thus reveal a new dimension to this important patronal relationship, while additionally offering an analysis of a previously unstudied manuscript pamphlet ('An account of an English Hermit' by Thomas Barnard) which Lady Beaumont sent to the Wordsworths in 1809. I show how Wordsworth’s fascination with monastic sites and silence influenced his understanding of linguistic and political representation, inheritance, community, and pastoral retreat. At the same time, this critical attention to silence aids a revaluation of the religious vision of his work. The thesis uses this historical and biographical information as a means of closely reassessing formal, linguistic, and generic features of Wordsworth's poetry. At its root, my work is about the natures of language, poetic representation, and readerly experience. How does Wordsworth communicate via silence? How does he use silence to 'create the taste' for his poetry? Where does silence impact on his renovation of genre and conceptions of form? I conclude that, for Wordsworth, silence is a positive gathering of stillness from within that is nourished by patterns of repeated activity and community. It is one of his most profound heuristic tools.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1950 O4 / Master of Science

The Italianate Wordsworth is a study of William Wordsworth's enduring interest in Italian literature and culture -- an important aspect of his intellectual life and creativity to which no previous book has been devoted. Of all the first-generation Romantics, Wordsworth was the most influenced by Italian poetry and aesthetics. The roots of his passion for the Italian language stretch back to the earliest stages of his imaginative development and extend throughout his life. His voluminous reading of and recurrent engagement with Italian texts -- as translator and imitator -- began in the late 1780s, when he was under the tutelage of Agostino Isola at Cambridge University. Wordsworth translated works by Petrarch, the paradigmatic Italian sonneteer, in 1789-90; by Ludovico Ariosto, the master of epic romance, between 1789 and 1795, in 1802, and in 1815; by Pietro Metastasio, author of popular songs and melodramas, in 1802-1803; by Michelangelo Buonarroti, the artist, poet, and polymath, in 1804 and again in 1839-1840; and by Gabriello Chiabrera, the epitaphist, in 1809-10 and 1837. Wordsworth's immersion in Italian culture became complete in 1837 when, at the age of sixty-seven, he made an extended visit to Italy. During the four months of this sojourn he was able, after years of dedicated reading and translation of major Italian texts from the foundational Trecento to the pre-Romantic Enlightenment, to realize fully his connection with Italy. In the period that followed, he composed poems that addressed various aspects of Italian history, politics, and culture; and in the last collection of poetry he published in his lifetime, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842), he included a series of twenty-eight poetic reflections entitled "Memorials of a Tour in Italy." This dissertation sheds light not only on Wordsworth's debt to Italian culture but also on our inherited ideas about the English Romantic relationship to Italy. Given the emphasis traditionally placed on the Italianate leanings of the second-generation Romantics, the impact of Italian literature on the mind and writings of a first-generation poet like Wordsworth has been largely forgotten. Thus the "Italianate Wordsworth" comes as something of a surprise. Time and again, he expresses his veneration for the style and sensibility of Italian poets from Dante to Tasso, often going so far as to emulate their techniques and adopt their cadences in his original English verse. As a poet, scholar, translator, and traveler, he is receptive to all that Italian civilization provides.

No description available.

Based on Derrida's deconstruction and other methodologies, this six-chapter thesis aims at effecting a valid re-reading of self manifested in Wordsworth's The Prelude. What the stop here introductory chapter unfolds is the motivation to pursue this research, a summary of the related scholarship to date, an overview of the poem, and a description of the theoretical approaches. The second chapter is an attempt to identify the internal instability, fluidity, and ambivalence of self that inform The Prelude. Wordsworth's language is what the third chapter concerns. It seeks to work out a way into the following questions: Does Wordsworth know that self is a trick of language and ever-changing? If he does, how profound is his knowledge? Since it is self that Wordsworth does hope to privilege, what we tend to identify as the reconciliation of nature, imagination and that self can hardly be realized and is little more than an illusion. This is the subject to which the fourth chapter is devoted. Because of his inability to get rid of the sense of confinement and insecurity even in the face of what he may call the renovating virtues, a scene that repeats more frequently in The Prelude is Wordsworth's continuous struggle against them. To do Wordsworth justice, however, to argue that he is not the only one whose subject is unstable, a history of self and its inevitable relation to other is provided in the fifth chapter. I suggest here also that if the position of self is precarious, that of autobiography, a genre that purports to articulate subjectivity, cannot be more secure. In conclusion, we have a review of the maintained dialogue between Wordsworth and Derrida. For the sake of de/construction, the thesis ends with an attempt and a hope to put everything back to what it is.

This thesis adopts a historical point of view to analyze Wordsworth¡¦s concept of education in relation to nineteenth-century English educational reform. In the nineteenth century, mass education, following the pace of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, became an indispensable social issue. Among the diverse educational reform movements, Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell¡¦s monitorial system was most prominent in that they provided a pedagogy that utilized teaching assistants to achieve efficiency and sufficiency in a large classroom and thus fulfilled the need of large-quantitative education of the age. Featured by efficiency, sufficiency, and materialism, the monitorial system best embodies the spirit of the Industrial Age. On the other hand, Wordsworth insisted on a community-based educational philosophy that urged people of his age to cherish old moral concepts such as harmonious, affectionate, and cooperative communal spirit inherent in traditional rural communities. The poet, representing the eighteenth-century rural tradition, observed with anxiety those children raised in an materialistic atmosphere. He delineates in his major works, especially The Excursion, a social vision that provides the best environment for the development and education of a spiritually mature man in which nature, man, and society are incorporated into a harmonious unity. This insistence on the old rural tradition distanced Wordsworth from his contemporary educational reformers and caused him to withdraw from his original support of the monitorial system.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of English Language anf Literature, August, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1985.

No description available.

This dissertation focuses on a Romanticism that was profoundly global in scope, and examines the boundary-crossing literary techniques of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. These authors saw identity as delimited by artificial borders, and we witness in their work competitions between local and global, immediate and infinite, home and away – all formulated in spatial terms. This thesis argues that by using motifs and philosophies associated with “borderless” global travel, these authors radically destabilized definitions of nature, history, and the home. Wordsworth and the Shelleys saw the act of travel as essentially cosmopolitan, and frequently depicted spaces outside of familiar boundaries as being rich in imaginative vitality. Their fiction and poetry abounds with examples of North American primitivism, radical modes of transportation, and unknown territories sought by passionate explorers. Importantly, they often used such examples of foreignness to rejuvenate familiar spaces and knowledge – these were individuals determined to retain a certain amount of local integrity, or connection with the reluctant minds who feared alien contexts. As such, they were each aware of the fragility of embedded minds, and the connection of these minds to bordered historical contexts. Aware of the dangers posed by uninhibited imaginative movements, they depicted travel as an artistically seductive activity. Their impulse as authors was thus to use global experiences as a tool of literary expression, while refraining from a total abandonment of local responsibility. This dissertation therefore argues that the imaginative experience of space in the Romantic period was profoundly split, tethered on the one hand to custom and familiarity, and on the other aspiring to boundless global freedoms.