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Cover image of The Wordsworthian Enlightenment
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The Wordsworthian Enlightenment

Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading

edited by Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson

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Over the past four decades, Geoffrey Hartman's voice has been one of the most important and profound in contemporary literary theory. Most noted for his scholarship on Wordsworth and Romanticism, Hartman developed throughout his work an original conception of the relationship between literary and critical writing that is still considered a deeply significant contribution to the field.

In The Wordsworthian Enlightenment, the most important contemporary critics of Romantic poetry and trauma reflect on Hartman's work and its lasting influence. This collection of sixteen essays—including a new...

Over the past four decades, Geoffrey Hartman's voice has been one of the most important and profound in contemporary literary theory. Most noted for his scholarship on Wordsworth and Romanticism, Hartman developed throughout his work an original conception of the relationship between literary and critical writing that is still considered a deeply significant contribution to the field.

In The Wordsworthian Enlightenment, the most important contemporary critics of Romantic poetry and trauma reflect on Hartman's work and its lasting influence. This collection of sixteen essays—including a new essay from Hartman—provides a wide-ranging and thorough perspective on recent approaches to Romanticism.

Contributors: Leslie Brisman, Yale University; Gerald L. Bruns, University of Notre Dame; Cathy Caruth, Emory University; Helen Regueiro Elam, University of Albany; Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago; Paul H. Fry, Yale University; Kevis Goodman, University of California at Berkeley; Ortwin de Graef, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium); Robert J. Griffin, Texas A & M University; Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University; J. Douglas Kneale, University of Western Ontario; Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara; Peter J. Manning, Stony Brook University; Donald G. Marshall, Pepperdine University; J. Hillis Miller, University of California at Irvine; Lucy Newlyn, Oxford University; Patricia Parker, Stanford University.

Reviews

Reviews

An important contribution to contemporary Wordsworth criticism and to Holocaust studies.

An unusual collection... Moments of unintentionally comical earnestness even signal the urgent need for the fresh modes of critical thinking that this book does so much to encourage.

This very fine collection brings together many significant articles by eminent literary critics and scholars.

A rich variety of sensitive and highly intelligent interpretive readings of Wordsworth, Romantic and post-Romantic poetics, and literary criticism.

Presents the breadth of Geoffrey Hartman's critical influence on a generation of scholars similarly engaged with the two major concerns of his long and fruitful writing career: Romanticism and, in particular, Wordsworth and Holocaust studies with regard to memory and trauma. The essays are uniformly high in caliber and their critical wit and sensibility honor Hartman in thoroughly appropriate ways.

About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
384
ISBN
9780801881879
Illustration Description
1 halftone
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Nature and Memory in the Post Era
Chapter 1. Reading: The Wordsworthian Enlightenment
Chapter 2. Encrypted Sympathy: Wordsworth's Infant Ideology
Chapter 3. Romantic

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Nature and Memory in the Post Era
Chapter 1. Reading: The Wordsworthian Enlightenment
Chapter 2. Encrypted Sympathy: Wordsworth's Infant Ideology
Chapter 3. Romantic Memory
Part II: Boundaries and the Problem of Knowledge
Chapter 4. Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth
Chapter 5. Poetic Knowledge: Geoffrey Hartman's Romantic Poetics
Chapter 6. Wordsworth's Horse
Part III: Representation and Terror: Proleptic Histories
Chapter 7. The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning
Chapter 8. Making Time for History: Wordsworth, the New Historicism, and the Apocalyptic Fallacy
Chapter 9. Sound Government, Polymorphic Bears: The Winter's tale and Other Metamorphoses of Eye and Ear
Chapter 10. The Other Scene of Travel: Wordsworth's "Musings Near Aquapendente"
Chapter 11. Writing Criticism: Art, Transcendence, and History
Part IV: Audible Scenes: Ecologies of Reading
Chapter 12. Gentle Hearts and Hands: Reading Wordsworth After Geoffrey Hartman
Chapter 13. "Reading After": The Anxiety of the Writing Subject
Chapter 14. Daring to Go Wrong
Chapter 15. Rachel When From the Lord
Chapter 16. An Interview With Geoffrey Hartman
Notes
Contributors
Index

Author Bios
Featured Contributor

Helen Regueiro Elam

Helen Regueiro Elam is an associate professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York.