William Wordsworth: A Poetic Life - Hardcover

Mahoney, John L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0823217159 ISBN 13: 9780823217151

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Wordsworth: A Poetic Life is a new biography of the great father of British Romanticism. It is new in several ways, most notably in the way it approaches the life of the poet. Paying its proper respect to the classic lives of Wordsworth by Mary Moorman and Stephen Gill, it attempts to tell the story of the life through a more rigorous reading of key and representative works of the poet, through careful blending of life and poetry. Wordsworth offers the story of the literariness of the poet's life - childhood and adolescence in the Lake District, education at Cambridge, love and political radicalism in France, the long period of residence in Grasmere and Rydal, celebrity, and national and international recognition. Its reading of the poems, in tune with current theoretical practice, offers a sense of the continuities in Wordsworth's career as it moves away from familiar theories of a Golden Decade of creativity and a period of long decline. The book also works closely and rigorously with Wordsworth's poetry as a method of dramatizing the essentially poetic character of the poet's life.

About this title

About the Author:

John L. Mahoney is Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English at Boston College and specializes in British Enlightenment and Romantic Literature. He has previously published books on Hazlitt, Keats, and Coleridge.

From Library Journal:

Literary biography is flourishing these days, and now it's Wordsworth's turn in this examination of the "episodes in a poetic life," or moments when the poems and life intersect. Mahoney (Boston Coll.; The English Romantics, 1978) gives a cautious nod here to deconstruction, which he sees as exposing the different and often opposed meanings of a text, as well as the New Historicism, which deepens the reader's sense of the poet's engagement with the world. But while Mahoney's approach is enriched by both of these contemporary strategies, his larger goal is to write neither a critical study nor a life per se but something more like a biography of the poet's career, when Wordsworth was, in the fullest sense, his most writerly self. This book does not replace Stephen Gill's William Wordsworth (Oxford Univ., 1989. o.p.), the most readable and scholarly of recent biographies, but it does offer new and thorough readings of the poems. For all literature collections.?David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0823217159
• ISBN 13: 9780823217151
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 301