Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics

This book offers a fresh understanding of the role of aesthetics in Wordsworth's major poetry and prose.

Theresa M. Kelley (Author)

9780521131575, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 February 2010

264 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

This book offers a fresh understanding of the role of aesthetics in Wordsworth's major poetry and prose. Arguing that Wordsworth presents sublimity and beauty as strata in the mind's aesthetic retrieval, Professor Kelley's 1988 text proposes geological precedents for this aesthetic model and evaluates its differences from the models developed by Burke, Kant and Hegel. This study sheds light on Wordworth and Romanticism in several ways. It establishes key differences between his aesthetics and that of Burke, Kant and other predecessors; it offers an insightful understanding of the aesthetic nature of Wordsworth's poetic achievement; and it grounds its close, rhetorical analysis of texts and figures in relevant historical and political contexts.

List of plates
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Archaeologies
3. The scene of aesthetic instruction
4. Revolution and the egotistical sublime
5. Revisionary aesthetics in The Prelude
6. The aesthetics of containment
7. 'Family of Floods'
8. Conclusion: aesthetics and poetic language
Appendix
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]