Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity

by David Simpson

• ISBN13: 9780521898775
• ISBN10: 0521898773
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This new reading of Wordworth's poetry by leading critic David Simpson centers 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 labor and urbanization; 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

At the limits of sympathy

At home with homelessness

Figures in the mist

Timing modernity: around 1800

The ghostliness of things

Living images, still lives

The scene of reading

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