Research Catalog

Title

Romantic vagrancy : Wordsworth and the simulation of freedom / Celeste Langan.

Author

Langan, Celeste.

Publication

Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 304 pages : illustrations; 24 cm.

Summary

• Romantic Vagrancy offers a provocative account of Wordsworth's representation of walking as the exercise of imagination, by tracing a recurrent analogy between the poet in search of materials and the literally dispossessed beggars and vagrants he encounters.
• Reading Wordsworth - and Rousseau before him - from the perspective of current debates about the political and social rights of the homeless, Celeste Langan argues that both literature and vagrancy are surprisingly rich and disturbing images of the "negative freedom" at the heart of liberalism. Langan shows how the formal structure of the Romantic poem - the improvisational excursion - mirrors its apparent themes, often narratives of impoverishment of abandonment. According to Langan, the encounter between the beggar and the passerby in Wordsworth's poetry does not simply reveal a social conscience or its lack; it represents the advent of the liberal subject, whose identity is stretched out between origin and destination, caught between economic and political forces, and the workings of desire.
• Langan's powerful and innovative argument revises current views both of Wordsworth's poetry and of the relation of literature to its social and political context.

Series Statement

Cambridge studies in Romanticism

Uniform Title

Cambridge studies in Romanticism.

Subjects

• Poets in literature
• Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850 > Political and social views
• Literature and society > England > History > 19th century
• Vagrancy in literature
• Walking in literature
• Liberalism in literature
• Homelessness in literature
• Romanticism > England

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 272-299) and index.

Contents

1. Rousseau plays the beggar: the last words of citizen subject -- 2. Money walks: Wordsworth and the right to wander -- 3. Walking and talking at the same time: the "two histories" of The Prelude -- 4. The walking cure.

ISBN

• 0521475074 (hc)
• 9780521475075 (hc)

LCCN

94049735

OCLC

ocm31865575

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries