Wordsorth, Commodification, and Social Concern The Poetics of Modernity [Paperback]

David Simpson's reading of Wordsworth examines Wordsworth's reaction to changes in the modern world at the turn of the century.Leading critic David Simpson offers a reading of Wordsworth's poetry. Reading Wordsworth alongside Marx and Derrida, Simpson examines Wordsworth's extraordinary and original response to the massive changes in the condition of the modern world at the turn of the nineteenth century.Leading critic David Simpson offers a reading of Wordsworth's poetry. Reading Wordsworth alongside Marx and Derrida, Simpson examines Wordsworth's extraordinary and original response to the massive changes in the condition of the modern world at the turn of the nineteenth century.This reading of Wordworth's poetry by leading critic David Simpson centres on its almost obsessive representation of spectral forms and images of death in life. Wordsworth is reacting, Simpson argues, to the massive changes in the condition of England and the modern world at the turn of the century: mass warfare; the increased scope of machine-driven labour and urbanisation; and the expanding power of commodity form in rendering economic and social exchange more and more abstract, more and more distant from human agency and control. Reading Wordsworth alongside Marx and Derrida, Simpson examines the genesis of an attitude of concern which exemplifies the predicament of modern subjectivity as it faces suffering and distress.Introduction; 1. At the limits of sympathy; 2. At home with homelessness; 3. Figures in the mist; 4. Timing modernity: around 1800; 5. The ghostliness of things; 6. Living images, still lives; 7. The scene of reading. David Simpson pursues an elegant thesis: Wordsworth's writing is haunted by specters and automatons because it records the early stages of modernity as shaped by the 'ghostly' work of the commodity form... Other critics have written about Wordsworth and modernity, and Romanticists will note quick, dense treatments of subjects such as time, 'thing theory,' anló