Deep Ecological Consciousness and Interconnectedness in William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey

Humans and nature interconnectedness is a dynamic process. The extensive misuse of natural resources has left us in an uncontrolled situation. Ecological disasters are worsening our relationship with nature. Humans’ anthropocentric attitude to dominate nature needed to be relooked from biocentric lenses. Rediscovering our interconnectedness with nature will advance our ecological consciousness to bring equilibrium between humans and nature. This paper intends to examine “Tintern Abbey”, the famous poetry by William Wordsworth to raise awareness of the interconnectedness of humans and nature in people’s minds, through deep ecological perspectives.

Wordsworth’s Lucy poems as the Reflections of the French Revolution: A New Historicist Study

The current study takes a New Historic outlook toward William Wordsworth’s the “Lucy Poems” and believes that by a minute scrutiny of these poems we can expose the power structure and the dominant discourses that according to New Historicism have shaped the poet’s character, society and world. Accordingly, the paper suggests that the poet through symbolic and non-symbolic ways has embedded historical and political facts in these poems. To do so, the research will reveal some controversial correspondences among these poems, William Wordsworth’s life and historical facts of the French Revolution. To support this idea, the study will bring quotations not only from modern conspicuous literary critics but also from the poets and Romantic contemporaries to show how the historical and political discourses of the period have greatly influenced both William Wordsworth and even the literature of the whole era, i.e., Romanticism. As a matter of fact, this research intends to connect the “Lucy Poems” to the contemporary historical context and the poet’s ideals of the Revolution in France. The findings, however, reveal that William Wordsworth has been submissive to the historical events of his time.

Romantic Autopsy

Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading charts how medicine influenced the literature of British Romanticism in its themes, motifs, and—most fundamentally—forms. Drawing on new medical specialties at the turn of the nineteenth century along with canonical poems and novels, this book shows that both fields develop analogies that saw literary works as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Such analogies invited readers and doctors to produce a shared methodology of interpretation. The book’s most distinctive contribution is protocols of diagnosis: a set of practices for interpretation that could be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand fiction and poetry. In Romanticism, such interpretive protocols crossed between the emergent medical fields of anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology, and the most innovative literary texts, including the lyrics of William Wordsworth and John Keats, the elegies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. Romantic poems and novels were read through techniques designed for the analysis of disease, while autopsy reports and case histories employed stylistic features associated with poetry and fiction. Such practices counter the assumption of a growing specialization in Romanticism, while suggesting that symptomatic reading (treating a text’s superficial signs as evidence of deeper meaning), a practice still debated today, originated from medicine. Romantic Autopsy provides an original account of the life and afterlife of Romantic-era medicine and literature, offering an important new history underlying modern-day approaches to literary analysis.

Lecture 7: Visual Persuasion

Lecture 7 examines the application of rhetorical principles to images to see how they are imagined to be persuasive and the ways in which that power of persuasion has been theorized. Whether through discourse or imagery, the notion of persuasion as understood in relation to images is accounted for in a discussion ranging from Plato to William Wordsworth, from Roland Barthes to Paul Messaris, from metaphysics to idolatry. Résumé Le septième cours examine l’application de principes rhétoriques aux images afin de voir comment on a envisagé celles-ci comme étant persuasives et comment on a théorisé leur pouvoir de persuasion. Ce cours rend compte de cette idée de persuasion par rapport aux images, qu’on en ait traité par le discours ou par l’image même, dans une discussion allant de Platon à William Wordsworth, de Roland Barthes à Paul Messaris, de la métaphysique à l’idolâtrie.

crianças de Salinger:

Resumo: O presente artigo procura demonstrar que há uma forte similaridade entre a maneira pela qual o escritor norte-americano J.D. Salinger construiu os vários personagens criança de Nine Stories (1953) – especialmente aquele nomeado Teddy – e a poética romântica da infância, inaugurada por autores ingleses como William Blake e William Wordsworth, onde a criança é representada como uma entidade sagrada, portadora de uma pureza e sabedoria celestiais. Para tanto, operamos uma análise direta dos contos de Salinger – pela qual exploramos suas personagens e técnicas literárias –, mas também uma ampla revisão bibliográfica que visa rastrear os motivos que levaram ao surgimento dessa poética literária da infância no século XVIII e sua continuidade até o século XX, além de identificar algumas das interinfluências das doutrinas filosóficas, teológicas e psicanalíticas que debateram a infância durante os últimos séculos. Desta forma, o presente artigo transita por questões como: desenvolvimento e educação infantil, o pecado original, inocência, experiência social e mundana, pureza de intenções e estado natural, iluminação espiritual, Salvação Cristã e Nirvana Zen-Budista. Elementos que se vinculam à sacralização da infância operada por diversos autores de textos literários, a exemplo de Blake, Wordsworth e, claro, Salinger.

Transcending Self-Consciousness: Imagination, Unity and Self-Dissolution in the English Romantic and Sufis Epistemology

English Romantic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often recounts an individual life journey which depicts physical and spiritual pilgrimage and traverses both the inner and outer world to liberate the self and reach a revelatory moment of unification where the division between human mind and the external world is reconciled. For the Romantic poets this reconciliatory state cannot be achieved through rational investigation but via the power of imagination. In this regard, there is striking resemblance between the mystical and philosophical thought of Sufism and the idealistic thought of the English Romantic poets as they both strive for a sense of unification with the Divine or the Ultimate reality, and they both rely on imagination and intuitive perception to apprehend reality. Applying an analytical-comparative approach with specific reference to Northrop Frye’s anagogic theory (1957) which emphasizes literary commonalities regardless of direct influence or cultural or theological distinctions, this study endeavors to depict that certain Romantic poets’ longing for the reconciliation of subject and object dualism via imagination and its sublime product, poetic language, echoes the mystic’s pursuit of transcendental states of consciousness and unification with the divinely infinite. Through analysis of the concept of self-dissolution (fana) in Islamic mysticism and Sufi literature, particularly the poems of Jalal ad-Din Mohammad Balkhi (1207-1273) known in the West as Rumi, the outcome of this study reveals that the Romantics’ yearning for a state of reconciliation, which is prevalent in the major works of the Romantic poets such as William Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821), corresponds to the mystic’s pursuit of unity or the Sufi’s concept of self-annihilation or fana.

Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland: The Creation of the Romantic Author

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.