Becoming Wordsworthian : a performative aesthetics / Elizabeth A. Fay.

Author
Fay, Elizabeth A., 1957- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, ©1995.
Description
viii, 279 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Availability

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks PR5892.A34 F39 1995 Browse related items Request

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    Summary note
    This innovative book explores the hypothesis that "Wordsworth the Poet" is an imaginative projection in which both William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy collaborated, developing a persona that the siblings strove to inhabit. Because William was its principal enactor, both publicly and privately, poetically and experimentally, his tendency was to sublimate Dorothy into an audible but invisible muse, located just behind him. Dorothy, however, always imagined herself in a collaborative or twinned relation to William, even when he was absent. She experienced the Wordsworthian role as increasingly alienating, more an aesthetic performance to be enacted at will, whereas William found the role ever more natural and inseparable from himself. This book explores the ways in which the Wordsworths were particularly suited to develop their collaborative persona, the literary fictions they drew on, and the value they derived from such a concerted and utopian effort. The author bases her work on well-known Wordsworthian texts, as well as little-read lyrics and essays of William and the comparatively unknown oeuvre of Dorothy
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-273) and index.
    Contents
    • Ch. 1. The Wordsworthian Performative
    • Ch. 2. The Charted Valley
    • Ch. 3. Authoring Selves, Traversing Ground
    • Ch. 4. Mountains and Abysses
    • Ch. 5. The Poetics of Negotiating Charts.
    ISBN
    • 0870239600 ((alk. paper))
    • 9780870239601 ((alk. paper))
    LCCN
    94037565
    OCLC
    31289178
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