Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics

Download or read book Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics written by Theresa M. Kelley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988-03-31 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fresh understanding of the role of aesthetics in Wordsworth's major poetry and prose. Arguing that Wordsworth presents sublimity and beauty as strata in the mind's aesthetic retrieval, Professor Kelley's 1988 text proposes geological precedents for this aesthetic model and evaluates its differences from the models developed by Burke, Kant and Hegel. This study sheds light on Wordworth and Romanticism in several ways. It establishes key differences between his aesthetics and that of Burke, Kant and other predecessors; it offers an insightful understanding of the aesthetic nature of Wordsworth's poetic achievement; and it grounds its close, rhetorical analysis of texts and figures in relevant historical and political contexts.