According to David Collings, Wordsworth interpreted the outbreak of
war between England and France in 1793 as a cataclysmic event, one
whose utterly disfiguring effect he would trace in his work over
the next decade. Expanding upon this extravagant interpretation of
events, Collings argues, Wordsworth constructed a poetics of
cultural dismemberment -- a way for culture to imagine that it
survives in the midst of its own destruction. In Wordsworthian
Errancies, Collings challenges prevailing critical approaches to
Romantic poetry by describing and critiquing this deconstructive
account of culture in Wordsworth's poetry.
Drawing ideas from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism,
feminism, and queer theory, Collings' reading reveals a radically
new Wordsworth, one who is far more concerned with various "queer"
modes of sexuality than previously suspected. In a provocative
reading of The Prelude, for example, Collings argues that
Wordsworth associated his poetic power with homoerotic masochistic
fantasies and with his involuntary delight in traumatic events. He
also redefines the debate concerning the politics of Wordsworth's
poetry: disputing recent critics who claim that Wordsworth
retreated from history into a poetry of the self, Collings argues
instead that the very notion of the solitary, autobiographical
subject derived from Wordsworth's sense of cultural trauma.
The suspect dimension of Wordsworth's poetry, Collings
concludes, is not its retreat from history but rather its claim
that history is disaster.
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