Examination of the best writing from periodicals of the time, showing the tone of general criticism, the phrases of literature that engaged the critics, and how criticism varied in different parts of the country.

The Global Wordsworth examines Anglophone writers who repurposed William Wordsworth's poetry. By reading Wordsworth in dialog with J. M. Coetzee, Lydia Maria Child, and Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine Bergren revitalizes our understanding of Wordsworth's career and its place in the canon.

Daniel Robinson provides a comprehensive guide to studying Wordsworth at undergraduate level.

William Wordsworth's poems are inhabited by beggars, vagrants, peddlers, and paupers. This book analyzes how a few key poems from Wordsworth's early years constitute a direct engagement with and intervention into the politics of poverty and reform that swept the social, political, and cultural landscape in England during the 1790s. In Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse, Gary Harrison argues that although Wordsworth's poetry is implicated in an ideology that idealizes rustic poverty, it nonetheless invests the image of the rural poor with a certain, if ambiguously realized, power. The early poems challenge the complacency of middle-class readers by constructing a mirror in which they confront the possibility of their own impoverishment (both economic and moral), and by investing the marginal poor with a sense of dignity and morality otherwise denied them.

This book explains how complex relationships between Britons, Native Americans and Anglo-Americans shaped eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture.