This reading of Wordworth's poetry by leading critic David Simpson centres 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 labour and urbanisation; 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.
Author(s): David Simpson
Series: Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Edition: 1
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 292
Half-title......Page 3
Series Title......Page 4
Title......Page 5
Copyright......Page 6
Dedication......Page 7
Contents......Page 9
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Introduction: The ghost and the machine: spectral modernity......Page 11
Promising the World......Page 27
The concerns of civil society......Page 32
Rational Sympathy, Virtual Sympathy......Page 39
Who Can "Afford to Suffer"?......Page 49
In the Place of the Other......Page 64
Moving Parts......Page 73
A Dance of Death......Page 85
Bright volumes of vapors......Page 93
When legs forget their bodies......Page 101
The class which is not one......Page 115
A multitude of causes unknown to former times......Page 126
Valuing the spots of time......Page 131
Silence visible and perpetual calm......Page 153
Tables that think and do tricks......Page 160
Spending in private......Page 176
Not all alive, nor dead......Page 184
A spectacle to which there is no end?......Page 197
Time and tidings......Page 207
A book of books......Page 216
Eet waters of a drowning world......Page 237
Introduction......Page 245
At the limits of sympathy......Page 246
At home with homelessness......Page 250
Figures in the mist......Page 253
Timing modernity: around 1800......Page 256
The ghostliness of things......Page 260
Living images, still lives......Page 264
The scene of reading......Page 266
Bibliography......Page 270
Index......Page 284
