The Global Wordsworth

Romanticism Out of Place

Katherine Bergren

2019
226 pages
$34.95
ISBN 9781684480128
Transits

The Global Wordsworth charts the travels of William Wordsworth's poetry around the English-speaking world. But, as Katherine Bergren shows, Wordsworth's afterlives reveal more than his influence on other writers; his appearances in novels and essays from the antebellum U.S. to post-Apartheid South Africa change how we understand a poet we think we know. Bergren analyzes writers like Jamaica Kincaid, J. M. Coetzee, and Lydia Maria Child who plant Wordsworth in their own writing and bring him to life in places and times far from his own - and then record what happens. By working beyond narratives of British influence, Bergren highlights a more complex dynamic of international response, in which later writers engage Wordsworth in conversations about slavery and gardening, education and daffodils, landscapes and national belonging. His global reception - critical, appreciative, and ambivalent - inspires us to see that Wordsworth was concerned not just with local, English landscapes and people, but also with their changing place in a rapidly globalizing world. This study demonstrates that Wordsworth is not tangential but rather crucial to our understanding of Global Romanticism.

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Reviews

"A model of academic excellence, this literary study of William Wordsworth upon various cultures around the world is an extraordinarily informative and thought-provoking read."
-Midwest Book Review

"Recommended."
-Choice

"One aspect of Wordsworth's poetry that has survived generations of revisionary scholarship is its sense of place. Katherine Bergren's mildly shocking case for Wordsworth 'sense of planet' operates through patient and innovative readings of three writers 'repurposing' Wordsworth's writings - a repurposing that in its turn reveals an entirely more worldly and global Wordsworth. Meticulously situating these intertextual encounters in the context of discussions of postcoloniality, transatlantic mobility, and ecocritical belonging, The Global Wordsworth updates a romantic worldliness we have only just begun to read."
- Pieter Vermeulen, author of Romanticism after the Holocaust

"Beautifully written, equally attentive to Romanticism and its afterlives, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in Romanticism and its legacies, whether scholarly or general readers. It offers a genuinely original perspective on Wordsworth and his works, without insisting on the privilege of canonicity."
- Nikki Hessell, Review 19, Leslie Humanities Center at Dartmouth College

"The three case studies in this book open up new ways of understanding the interplay between the global and the local in Wordsworth's poetry. The methodology of The Global Wordsworth is exciting and innovative and will have much to offer readers interested in understanding better the ways in which Romanticism might be deployed in a colonial or settler context. Writing myself from the vantagepoint of Australia, the vision of Romanticism, and of Wordsworth, that emerges in Bergren's book is more nuanced and indeed more 'worldly' than the one to which we have become accustomed."
- European Romantic Review, 2021

About the author:

Katherine Bergren is an assistant professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $99.95, 978-1-6844-8013-5; EPUB: $34.95, 978-1-6844-8014-2