The Revolutionary 'I' Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation [Hardcover]

In the winter of 1798-99, shut up in the freezing German town of Goslar, William Wordsworth began producing a series of lyrical fragments that appeared first in letters written to Coleridge and emerged eventually as source texts for The Prelude . These lyrics are revolutionary because they construct a new version of the autobiographical 'I'. The Revolutionary 'I' explores the numerous voices of the poetic speaker 'Wordsworth' and their relationship to the historical figure who shared the same name.Preface: The Prelude as Prologue Silencing the (Other) Self: Wordsworth as 'Wordsworth!' in 'There was a boy' The Politics of Self Presentation: Wordsworth as Revolutionary Actor in a Literary Drama Sounds into Speech: The Two-Part Prelude of 1799 as Dialogic Dramatic Monologue Coleridge as Catalyst to Autobiography: The Wordsworthian Self as Therapeutic Gift, 1804-1805 Dialogizing Dorothy: Voicing the Feminine as Spousal Sister in The Prelude Colonizing Consciousness: Culture as Identity in Wordsworth's Prelude and Walcott's Another Life Endnotes Bibliography Index

Ashton Nichols's The Revolutionary 'I ' trawls through versions of The Prelude up to and including the 1805 text in search of a fundamental Wordsworthian orgininality, which he believes is a generative source of most subsequent imaginative literature in English...he believes that Prelude breaks new autobiographical ground with its presentation of the I as a dramatized cultural self rather merely a mimetic revelation of identity.' - James Treadwell, The Wordsworth Circle

Ashton Nichols is Associate Professor of English at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.