Wordsworth has traditionally been understood as the 'poet of memory'. This book argues that 'unremembered pleasure', an idea Wordsworth formulates in 'Tintern Abbey' but is often overlooked by modern readers, is central to understanding his writing. Wordsworth's poems discover and articulate a broad range of previously unfelt, unnoticed, and unconscious satisfactions. As well as providing new interpretations of major and under-studied writing by Wordsworth, this volume challenges a long tradition of psychoanalytic reading of romanticism, which uses trauma to explain the limits of literary memory. The book contests key psychoanalytic concepts in literary criticism including repression, sublimation, mourning, and pleasure. It asks what it would mean for us to be 'surprised by joy'.

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth's poetry, other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion, and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

Deep Distresses is a study of the intersecting family and professional vicissitudes that afflicted Wordsworth during the period of his greatest poetic productivity. The negative national publicity over his mariner brother's death at sea is the focus of the family tragedy; hostile reception to Poems in Two Volumes (1807) is the focus of professional duress. Both topics become related through the intercession of the poet's patron, Sir George Beaumont, who attempts to ameliorate the family tragedy with money and his painting of Pecl Castle in a Storm, while hoping to groom Wordsworth for a place among the cultural elite of London. In its attention to nineteenth-century culture and business, this study offers an entirely new context for reading and re-interpreting many of Wordsworth's major works from Michael through the major lyrics of Poems in Two Volumes and the latter books of The Prelude. Richard E. Matlak is a Professor of English and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies at the College of the Holy Cross.

Certain moments in British Romantic poetry and art depict a state from which the attributes of existence – time and space, subject and object, language and visuality – have fallen away, leaving a domain prior to the world and to thought, the condition of mere existence. As Blank Splendour demonstrates, poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Clare as well as paintings by Turner evoke a condition that transpires in a time without time, a life without life. David Collings argues that these works invite us to move beyond the subtle remnants of ontology that linger in current versions of posthuman thought, such as affect theory and speculative realism, by opening up a domain of affect without affect, a world without objects. Anticipating the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, these works bring into view the mode of a deconstruction that emerged before the linguistic turn, one that meditates on the blank condition underlying modernity. Ultimately, Blank Splendour reveals how these works speak to our own moment, when thought, forced to contemplate its own extinction, enters a new form of mere existence.

Offers an explanation for the poet's mysterious and longstanding preoccupation with death and grief.

Romantic Wars is a collection of eight specially commissioned essays focusing on the relations between British Romantic culture (poetry, fiction, painting, and non-fictional prose) and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Whilst in recent years much attention has been paid to the influence of the French Revolution on British Romanticism, comparatively little has been written about the effects of war. This book takes, as its central thesis, the idea that Romanticism is facilitated and conditioned by a culture of hostility. Whether this is manifested in Blakean visions of 'mental warfare', or in socio-historical reflections on the links between conflict and nationhood, the essays in this volume seek to correct a prevailing assumption that the culture of this period is unaffected by discourses of violence. Through a combination of individual case studies - detailed readings of warfare in Coleridge, Byron, Charlotte Smith and Austen - and wider-ranging survey discussions, including essays on the representation of the British sailor and war poetry by women, the book provides a timely reflection on the texts and contexts of the first 'Great War'. The book is aimed at literary specialists and historians working in the areas of Romanticism and European history. It will also appeal to general readers with an interest in early nineteenth-century writing and British culture.

Romanticism and Speculative Realism features a range of scholars working at the intersection of literary poetics and philosophy. It considers how the writing of the Romantic era reconceptualizes the human imagination, the natural world, and the language that correlates them in radical ways that can advance current speculative debates concerning new ontologies and new materialisms. In their wide-ranging examinations of canonical and non-canonical romantic writers, the scholars gathered here rethink the connections between the human and non-human world to envision speculative modes of social being and ecological politics. Spanning historical and national frameworks-from historical romanticism to contemporary post-romantic ecology, and from British and German romanticism to global modernity-these essays examine life in all its varied forms in, and beyond, the Anthropocene.