Tag: 19th century

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McGinnis — Material Agency and the “Cluttered” Environment

McGinnis, April. “Material Agency and the ‘Cluttered’ Environment in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Travel Narratives.” European Romantic Review 33.3 (2022): 411–25.

Abstract: “Recent critical studies have explored the cultural significance of walking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasizing the connection between bodily activity and creative energies: in its rhythmic, repetitive motion, walking can bring the subject into a semi-hypnotic state that invites mental wandering. This essay traces the experience of walking through Dorothy Wordsworth’s travel narratives, but I shift focus from moving unhindered through open spaces to physically navigating more challenging environments. Drawing on James J. Gibson’s theory of environmental affordances and Andrew Pickering’s concept of nonhuman agency, I consider how cluttered landscapes persistently conduct our attention to the material continuity between human traveler and nonhuman environment. My suggestion is that this heightened awareness inspires a mode of ecological thinking that alters the individual’s ethical sensibility toward the nonhuman world. This conclusion demonstrates the often overlooked value of those less accommodating natural spaces. Moreover, reading Wordsworth’s narratives with an eye toward her presentation of material agency may help us to recover a sense of Wordsworth’s own authorial agency.”

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Comitini — Vocational Philanthropy (2005)

Comitini, Patricia. Vocational Philanthropy and British Women’s Writing, 1790–1810: Wollstonecraft, More, Edgeworth, Wordsworth. Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005.

Abstract (jacket): “Patricia Comitini’s study compels serious rethinking of how literature by women in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries should be read. Beginning with a description of the ways in which evolving conceptions of philanthropy were foundational to constructions of class and gender roles, Comitini argues that these changes enabled a particular kind of feminine benevolence that was linked to women’s work as writers.”

Copy: Library of Congress.
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Feder — Experimental Dorothy Wordsworth (2014)

Feder, Rachel. “The Experimental Dorothy Wordsworth.” Studies in Romanticism 53.4 (Winter, 2014): 541–59.

“To read Dorothy Wordsworth as an experimental writer, we must investigate how nineteenth-century books of daily writing functions as sites of intertextual and generic experimentation. As text objects that imitate public forms while serving private functions, such books facilitate cross-genre and cross textual conversation, collaboration, and invention” (p. 541).

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Beattie-Smith — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland (2021)

Beattie-Smith, Gillian. “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland: The Creation of the Romantic Author (Dzienniki szkockie Dorothy Wordsworth: Kreacja autorki romantycznej).” Postscriptum Polonistyczne 27.1 (2021); 51–67.

Abstract: “The increase in popularity of the Home Tour in the 19th century and the publication of many journals, diaries, and guides of tours of Scotland by, such as, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, led to the perception of Scotland as a literary tour destination. The tour of Scotland invariably resulted in a journal in which identities such as writer, traveller, observer, were created. The text became a location for the pursuit of a sense of place and identity. For women in particular, the text offered opportunities to be accepted as a writer and commentator. Dorothy Wordsworth made two journeys to Scotland: the first, in 1803, with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the second, in 1822 with Joanna Hutchinson, the sister of Mary, her brother’s wife. This paper considers Dorothy’s identity constructed in those Scottish journals. Discussions of Dorothy Wordsworth have tended to consider her identity through familial relationship, and those of her writing by what is lacking in her work. Indeed, her work and her writing are frequently subsumed into the plural of ‘the Wordsworths’. This paper considers the creation of individual self in her work, and discusses the social and spatial construction of identity in Dorothy’s discourse in her journals about Scotland.”

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Ożarska — Grand Tourists or Travellers? (2013)

Ożarska, Magdalena. “Grand Tourists or Travellers? Dorothy Wordsworth’s and Mary Shelley’s Travel Journals.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 61.2 (2013): 107–120.

Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1820 Journal of a Tour on the Continent and Mary Shelley’s 1844 Rambles illustrate two 19th-century approaches to the phenomenon of the Grand Tour: the Romantic (a traveller’s) and the anti-Romantic (a tourist’s). In terms of chronology, it would seem that both texts fully represent the Romantic approach to travel. However, this assumption will be tested in the present article. For a discussion thereof, apart from an overview of Chloe Chard’s characteristics of both approaches (1999), John Urry’s observations on tourist gazes (1995) may prove useful, if aspects of the anti-Romantic approach are determined in either text. A detailed examination reveals that Mary Shelley tends towards the concept of tourism rather than explorative travel despite embracing the national problems of her Italian ‘travelees.’ Dorothy Wordsworth’s travelogue, in turn, reflects the attitudes of the Romantic era.”

Digital text: Academia.