Tag: Romantic period

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Weiger — Love for Things (2012)

Weiger, Sarah. “‘A Love for Things That Have No Feeling’: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Significant Others.” European Romantic Review 23.6 (2012): 651–69.

Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s infrequently-cited poem, ‘Loving & Liking,’ offers a theory of love as an ethical relation to human and nonhuman others. This essay reads the poem with passages from the Alfoxden and Grasmere journals, exploring the various ways in which Wordsworth is responsive to objects and things that seem to distinguish themselves to her, standing out from their surroundings to catch her attention as individuals worthy of careful and extended engagement. Through the terms of this engagement, a tree is not simply an elm tree but what she calls ‘a creature by its own self’; a waterfall not only stands ‘upright by itself,’ but also is ‘its own self.’ Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, this essay identifies these objects and things in Wordsworth’s work as ‘significant others.’ Bringing the aesthetic and natural historical discourses of the Romantic period into conversation with current post-humanist and ecocritical ones, this essay explores the role of a special form of description in Dorothy’s relationships to nonhuman others.”

Copy: Web.

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Cervelli — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology (2007)

Cervelli, Kenneth R. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology. Studies in Major Literary Authors. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Contents:  Introduction — 1. Bringing It All Back Home: The Ecology of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals — 2. The High Road Home: Paths to Ecology in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland — 3. The Illuminated Earth: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecopoetry — 4. “More Allied to Human Life”: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Communion with the Dead — Conclusion: Trapped in the Weather of the Days: Dorothy Wordsworth in Her Environment — Notes — Bibliography — Index.

Summary (from the Routledge website): “Dorothy Wordsworth has a unique place in literary studies. Notoriously self-effacing, she assiduously eschewed publication, yet in her lifetime, her journals inspired William to write some of his best-known poems. Memorably depicting daily life in a particular environment (most famously, Grasmere), these journals have proven especially useful for readers wanting a more intimate glimpse of arguably the most important poet of the Romantic period. ¶ With the rise of women’s studies in the 1980s, however, came a shift in critical perspective. Scholars such as Margaret Homans and Susan Levin revaluated Dorothy’s work on its own terms, as well as in relation to other female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of a larger shift in the academy, feminist-oriented analyses of Dorothy’s writings take their place alongside other critical approaches emerging in the 1980s and into the next decade. ¶ One such approach, ecocriticism, closely parallels Dorothy’s changing critical fortunes in the mid-to-late 1980s. Curiously, however, the major ecocritical investigations of the Romantic period all but ignore Dorothy’s work while at the same time emphasizing the relationship between ecocriticism and feminism. The present study situates Dorothy in an ongoing ecocritical dialogue through an analysis of her prose and poetry in relation to the environments that inspired it.”

Copy: Library of Congress.

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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.