Wordsworth, commodification and social concern : the poetics of modernity / David Simpson.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 260-273) and index.

Introduction. The ghost and the machine: spectral modernity -- 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.

"This new reading of Wordsworth's poetry, by leading critic David Simpson, centers 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 labor and urbanization; and the expanding power of the 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."--Jacket

English.

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