Romantic Vagrancy Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom [Hardcover]

This powerful study revises both Wordsworth's poetry and the relation of literature to its social and political context.The Romantic association between the literary imagination and walking out-of-doors is a central structural and thematic feature of William Wordsworth's poetry. Reading Wordsworth -- and Rousseau, before him -- from the perspective of current debates about the civil rights of the homeless person and the passer-by, Celeste Langan challenges the Romantic tendency to equate walking with freedom, by exploring how encounters between the wandering poet and the destitute walker threaten to reveal the emptiness at the heart of the liberalism the poet celebrates.The Romantic association between the literary imagination and walking out-of-doors is a central structural and thematic feature of William Wordsworth's poetry. Reading Wordsworth -- and Rousseau, before him -- from the perspective of current debates about the civil rights of the homeless person and the passer-by, Celeste Langan challenges the Romantic tendency to equate walking with freedom, by exploring how encounters between the wandering poet and the destitute walker threaten to reveal the emptiness at the heart of the liberalism the poet celebrates.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 encountl“(