The Lake Poets and Professional Identity

ISBN-13: 9780521866385 / Angielski / Twarda / 2007 / 297 str.

Cambridge University Press

Opis

The idea that the inspired poet stands apart from the marketplace is considered central to British Romanticism. However, Romantic authors were deeply concerned with how their occupation might be considered a kind of labour comparable to that of the traditional professions. In the process of defining their work as authors, Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge - the 'Lake school' - aligned themselves with emerging constructions of the 'professional gentleman' that challenged the vocational practices of late eighteenth-century British culture. They modelled their idea of authorship on the learned professions of medicine, church, and law, which allowed them to imagine a productive relationship to the marketplace and to adopt the ways eighteenth-century poets had related their poetry to other kinds of intellectual work. In this work, Goldberg explores the ideas of professional risk, evaluation and competition that the writers developed as a response to a variety of eighteenth-century depictions of the literary career.

Recenzje

"The primary benefit of this critical approach is the argument’s seamlessness; Goldberg weaves an intricate, substantive account of the poets’ sustained efforts in the late 1790s to create a new professional paradigm that should have us rereading their works for informative glimpses of that work in progress."
-Sarah M. Zimmerman, Fordham University

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Introduction: professionalism and the Lake School of Poetry; Part 1. Romanticism, Risk, and Professionalism: 1. Cursing Doctor Young, and after; Part II. Genealogies of the Romantic Wanderer: 2. Merit and reward in 1729; 3. James Beattie and The Minstrel; Part III. Romantic Itinerants: 4. Authority and the itinerant cleric; 5. William Cowper and the itinerant Lake poet; Part IV. The Lake School, Professionalism, and the Public: 6. Robert Southey and the claims of literature; 7. 'Ministry more palpable': Wordsworth's Romantic professionalism; Notes; Bibliography; Index.