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Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (Paperback, 1st ed. 1982)
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Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (Paperback, 1st ed. 1982)
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Perhaps the most powerful feature of the Romantic imagination is
its ability to dissolve existing form and order and create it anew.
The Romantic investigation of the functions of the imagination also
leads to important insights concerning its problems and dangers.
Because it separates the person experiencing it from others around
him, the imagination introduces ways of seeing which cannot be
assumed to be simply communicable or easily shared, and which have
as their objects different forms or 'things'. These forms, or
figures, risk becoming for their originators both vehicles of
power, in so far as they do convince others of their reality, and
limiting constructs of prefigured order, inhibiting their users
from the perception of new relations and alternative meanings. When
the figured becomes the real, there thus arise difficulties in both
individual and social perceptions. Arguing from the stance that all
perception takes place by a creative (and hence potentially
divisive) assembly of images or qualities into things, David
Simpson shows that the analysis of figurative representation in
Wordsworth's writing is of central importance to his idea of the
human mind, and the way in which it is affected or allowed to
function by its environment, both human and physical. In this way
Wordsworth's ideas about the function of literature in society are
seen to be more fully worked out than readers have often assumed
them to be. Simpson pays particular attention to the ethical
consequences of different ways of figuring the real, offering an
explanation of Wordsworth's distinction between life in the town
and life among the mountains and lakes of north-west England. In
relating Wordsworth's poetry to important contemporary debates in
political economy such as those concerning the division of labour
and the evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of commerce
and luxury, he suggests that Wordsworth is a notable precursor of
that nineteenth-century tradition which sees the mind as open to
critical determination by social and environmental factors.
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