Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern
The Poetics of Modernity

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

David Simpson (Author)

9780521898775, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 February 2009

292 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.6 kg

'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

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.

Introduction
1. At the limits of sympathy
2. At home with homelessness
3. Figures in the mist
4. Timing modernity: around 1800
5. The ghostliness of things
6. Living images, still lives
7. The scene of reading.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literature & literary studies [D]