Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom

Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom

Langan, Celeste
Butler, Marilyn
Celeste, Langan

Paperback

Series: Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Book 15

Literary CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0521035104
ISBN13: 9780521035101
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: Dec 14 2006
Pages: 316
Weight: 1.02
Height: 0.71 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Romantic Vagrancy offers a provocative account of Wordsworth's representation of walking as the exercise of imagination, by tracing a recurrent analogy between the poet in search of materials and the literally dispossessed beggars and vagrants he encounters. Reading Wordsworth--and Rousseau before him--from the perspective of current debates about the political and social rights of the homeless, Celeste Langan argues that both literature and vagrancy are surprisingly rich and disturbing images of the 'negative freedom' at the heart of liberalism. Langan shows how the formal structure of the Romantic poem--the improvisational excursion--mirrors its apparent themes, often narratives of impoverishment or abandonment. According to Langan, the encounter between the beggar and the passerby in Wordsworth's poetry does not simply reveal a social conscience or its lack; it represents the advent of the liberal subject, whose identity is stretched out between origin and destination, caught between economic and political forces, and the workings of desire. Langan's powerful and innovative argument revises current views both of Wordsworth's poetry and of the relation of literature to its social and political context.

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