William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, English poet.

Romantic writers responded to the challenges of reform and revolution by rethinking the scope of political reason. What role should reason play in the creation of a free and just society? Can we claim to know anything in a field as complex as politics? And how can the cause of political rationalism be advanced when it is seen as having blood on its hands? These are the questions that occupied a group of British poets, philosophers, and polemicists in the years following the French Revolution. Timothy Michael argues that much literature of the period is a trial, or a critique, of reason in its political capacities and a test of the kinds of knowledge available to it. For Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin, the historical sequence of revolution, counter-revolution, and terror in France—and radicalism and repression in Britain—occasioned a dramatic reassessment of how best to advance the project of enlightenment. The political thought of these figures must be understood, Michael contends, in the context of their philosophical thought. Major poems of the period, including The Prelude, The Excursion, and Prometheus Unbound, are in this reading an adjudication of competing political and epistemological claims. This book bridges for the first time two traditional pillars of Romantic studies: the period’s politics and its theories of the mind and knowledge. Combining literary and intellectual history, it provides an account of British Romanticism in which high rhetoric, political prose, poetry, and poetics converge in a discourse of enlightenment and emancipation.

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth's poetry, other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion, and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

This collection of essays examines a wide range of topics relating to deconstruction, which emerged in France as a reaction to structuralism but has found its greatest response in America, where literary critics have built on its basic assumptions to create a new critical movement.

Poetry And Poetics Are Integrally Related. The Former Is An Art Based On Emotions, Whereas The Latter Is A Science Evaluating Poetry. So Long Their Common Mode Of Treatment Has Been To Excite In The Mind The Emotions Appropriate To The Subject-Matter. But Science And Art Are Not Identical. The Former Uses The Discursive Mode; And The Latter The Presentational Mode. While Science Is Truth, The Art Is Adjectively True , I.E. It Does Not Conflict With The Truth.The Book Critique Of Poetics Is An Extremely Bold And Far Reaching Attempt At A Comprehensive Theory Of Poetry. It Starts With A Sound-Sense Continuum And Ends With Quantum Poetics. The Path Of Evolution Is Marked By The Poetic Process, The Flow Of Rasa, The Flight Of Pegasus, The Dance Of Resonons, The Doctrine Of Suggestion, Rx For Rhetoric, The Logic Of Signs And Symbols, The Poetic Imagery, The Miracle Of Communication, The Concept Of Criticism, Style And Stylistics, The Law Of Inspiration And Catharsis, The Limits Of Art, The Philosophy Of Beauty, East And West In Poetics, And The Theory Of Literature. And This Has Been Treated In A Global Perspective, Which Harmonizes Both East And West In Poetics. A Balance Has Also Been Struck Between The Two Approaches To The Study Of Literature Extrinsic And Intrinsic. The Former Is Characterized By Psychology-Society And Other Arts Whereas The Latter By Style And Stylistics, Image And Metaphor, Rhetoric And Suggestion, Beauty And The Like. A New Theory Of Literature Has Been Derived From These. This Is Born In A Continuum Of Sound And Sense, Of Space And Time. It Provides An Organ Of Evaluating The Past, Present And Future Works Of Literature. In This Context Quantum Poetics Marks The End Of The Evolutionary Process.

This book provides the essential contexts for an understanding of all aspects of the major English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth.

The Ends of Critique re-examines the stakes of critique in the 21st century. In view of increasingly complex socio-political realities and shifts in a fully globalized world, the roles and manners of critique also change. The volume offers an unprecedented re-examination of critique under those conditions of global entanglement and asymmetrical relations from a diversity of scholarly perspectives within the humanities. All contributions move the notion of critique into more diverse traditions than the Eurocentric, Kantian tradition and emphasize the need to attend to a plurality of critical perspectives. The volume’s reflections move critique toward a situated, perspectival, and entangled critical stance, with interventions from decolonial and systemic, deconstructive and (post)human(ist) perspectives. In that way, the volume develops a decidedly different approach to critique than recent considerations of critique as post-critique (Felski) or those endebted to Frankfurt School thought and liberal theories of democracy. It is the first full-length research publication of the interdisciplinary research network Terra Critica.

This book is an analysis of literary texts that question, critique, or subvert anthropocentrism, the notion that the universe and everything in it exists for humans. Bryan Moore examines ancient Greek and Roman texts; medieval to twentieth-century European texts; eighteenth-century French philosophy; early to contemporary American texts and poetry; and science fiction to demonstrate a historical basis for the questioning of anthropocentrism and contemplation of responsible environmental stewardship in the twenty-first century and beyond. Ecological Literature and the Critique of Anthropocentrism is essential reading for ecocritics and ecofeminists. It will also be useful for researchers interested in the relationship between science and literature, environmental philosophy, and literature in general.

In 1808 Sir Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) inflicted a major defeat on Napoleon's forces at the battle of Vimiero, but promptly signed an armistice and convention (negotiated by Sir Hew Dalrymple with General Junot). The Convention permitted the evacuation of the latter's defeated army from Portugal to Bayonne - along with its equipment and its plunder. This disgraceful Convention was regarded by the people of Britain - government ministers excepted - as a betrayal of Britain's allies, Portugal and Spain. Some of the troops repatriated under this agreement fought against Sir John Moore's expeditionary force the following year, forcing his evacuation from northern Spain. Wordsworth's enormous pamphlet on the betrayal of the Iberian patriots by Britain's officer class is one of the most remarkable political documents produced by a Romantic poet. Here the text of W J B Owen's 1968 edition is republished for the bicentennial, with a critical symposium by Richard Gravil, Simon Bainbridge, David Bromwich, Timothy Michael and Patrick Vincent.