Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The Global Wordsworth examines Anglophone writers who repurposed William Wordsworth's poetry. By reading Wordsworth in dialog with J. M. Coetzee, Lydia Maria Child, and Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine Bergren revitalizes our understanding of Wordsworth's career and its place in the canon. Always considered the most provincial of the great Romantics, this study argues that Wordsworth's afterlives in former British colonies reveal a poet whose career came to see and represent the local, the national, and the global not as separate spheres, but as entangled by forces of British imperialism and colonial expansion. By examining Wordsworth through his afterlives, Bergren argues that he saw and represented England as increasingly contingent on a world beyond its shores. She addresses the effects of imperialism and capitalistic exchange on the appearance and meaning of that England, in both British Romanticism and the literatures of a world remade by imperial forces.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Synopsis
The Global Wordsworth charts the travels of William Wordsworth's poetry around the English-speaking world. But, as Katherine Bergren shows, Wordsworth's afterlives reveal more than his influence on other writers; his appearances in novels and essays from the antebellum U.S. to post-Apartheid South Africa change how we understand a poet we think we know. Bergren analyzes writers like Jamaica Kincaid, J. M. Coetzee, and Lydia Maria Child who plant Wordsworth in their own writing and bring him to life in places and times far from his own--and then record what happens. By working beyond narratives of British influence, Bergren highlights a more complex dynamic of international response, in which later writers engage Wordsworth in conversations about slavery and gardening, education and daffodils, landscapes and national belonging. His global reception--critical, appreciative, and ambivalent--inspires us to see that Wordsworth was concerned not just with local, English landscapes and people, but also with their changing place in a rapidly globalizing world. This study demonstrates that Wordsworth is not tangential but rather crucial to our understanding of Global Romanticism.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.