Visualizing Poverty in Wordsworth's Poetry

Scientific paper - Original scientific paper

• Author: Martina Domines Veliki
• Author's institution: University of Zagreb; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; (Department of English language and literature)
• Scientific / art field, discipline and subdiscipline: HUMANISTIC SCIENCES; Philology

Abstract (english)

This paper departs from the assumption that Wordsworth’s poetry is highly visual in its quality and it focuses on his three “great period” poems, “Michael”, “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “Resolution and Independence” (1798–1805) to show how Wordsworth represents poverty. By taking as its starting point some New Historicist readings of these poems (Simpson, Pfau, Connell, Liu) which highlighted Wordsworth’s blindness to social reality of the poor, it wants to enlarge the scope of historicist readings by introducing the framework of the New Poverty Studies (Korte, Christ). Furthermore, it insists on the assumption that the Romantic need to visualize landscape in the picturesque form becomes an important strategy of “configuring” (Korte) the reality of the poor. In other words, the way in which the poor are represented in Wordsworth’s poetry tells us something about practical engagements with poverty in late eighteenth-century England. Also, Wordsworth’s position of a middle-class observer who builds the tension between the seen and the deliberately unseen aspects of his social surrounding, show us how Wordsworth unconsciously falls under the spell of a larger class-related sensibility and thus fails in his humanitarian project.

• Keywords (english): William Wordsworth; New Historicism; New Poverty Studies; the picturesque
• Language: english
• Publication type: Scientific paper - Original scientific paper
• Publication status: Published
• Peer review: Peer review
• Publication version: Published version
• Journal title: Umjetnost riječi : Časopis za znanost o književnosti, izvedbenoj umjetnosti i filmu
• Numbering: vol. 63, no. 3-4, pp. 161-178
• p-ISSN: 0503-1583
• e-ISSN: 1849-1693
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.22210/ur.2019.063.3_4.02
• URN:NBN: urn:nbn:hr:131:780928
• Publication: 2019
• Document URL: https://hrcak.srce.hr/235861
• Type of resource: Text
• Access conditions: Open access
• Created on: 2022-05-05 09:53:39