This book emerged as a dissertation, which I completed at Harvard University in June of 2000. While its overall form is the same as in that version-hence its inclusion in a dissertation series-it has been polished and revised substantially over the intervening period, reframing the argument and taking account of more recent scholarship. My first debt of gratitude, though, goes to Leo Damrosch and Jim Engell, who as my dissertation advisers at Harvard read and reread the unruly piles of manuscripts which eventually boiled down into the current volume. This book's faults are my own, but many of its virtues would not exist without Leo and Jim.I want to express gratitude also to the members of the informal Romanticism study group at Boston University, which helped to sustain me and gave me a sense of scholarly community both while in graduate school and during the year afterwards-especially Chuck Rzepka, Jonathan Mulrooney, Colin Harris, and Michael Hamburger. Chuck has been extremely generous in reading and commenting on my work in several versions. David Fairer was also very generous in giving me feedback on my project and an earlier version of my Introduction, which has helped me immensely in reconceptualizing my overall argument. Special thanks also to Jonathan Mulrooney, Noah Herringman, and my current colleague, John Staines, for reading and commenting on a more recent version of the Introduction on a tight deadline: your comments have been timely and immensely helpful, and they are much appreciated. Other colleagues and friends have supported me in innumerable ways, both intellectually and personally: I hesitate to try to name them all, only in the fear ofleaving someone out, but they will know who they are and feel my gratitude to them. I do want to give special thanks to my colleagues in the English Department and my students at Earlham College, and to other members of the Earlham faculty, staff, and student body, who have given me a powerful sense of community and who continually bring me back to the issues of social Vtt VtttAcknowledgments engagement, responsibility, and justice against which I believe all scholarship must ultimately be measured. Earlham as an institution has also given me generous support to pursue this specific scholarly project.My chapter on Thomas Gray is a slightly revised version of an essay of the same title, which appeared in The Age of Johnson 13 ( 2002): 207-37. A section of my sixth chapter is forthcoming as part of an essay entitled "Wordsworth's 'System,' the Critical Reviews, and the Reconstruction of Literary Authority," due to appear around the time of this book's publication in European Romantic Review. My thanks to the editors of both journals, who have given me permission to reprint that material here.Finally, I want to dedicate this book to my parents, who taught me to work hard, believe in myself, and have confidence in my own ideas (among many other things); and to Beth, who has sometimes found herself in competition with this book over the past year, but who supports...
This essay argues that William Wordsworth's poetry constructs a subject position analogous to that of the photographic viewer: hence, a photographic subjectivity. Critics have often read Wordsworth's writing as opposing imagination against visibility and mimetic realism. Many of the visual structures of his poetry, however, continue the structures of the picturesque, whose desire to capture the landscape as framed image culminated in the technology of photography. These structures of perception include the stationed point of view of the observer, focusing the scene from a single location; the tendency to reduce the multisensory, ambient experience of lived environment to pure vision; the separation of the observer from the landscape; and the resulting general disembodiment of that observer. Much of Wordsworth's poetry positions the observer in these ways in order to capture images that can then be viewed in private isolation (as in the ““spots of time””), like a series of internalized photographs. These structures of visuality construct what would emerge, after the invention of photography, as a photographic subjectivity, complementing (rather than opposing) the objectivity of the photographic image. They define the viewing subject, in the manner of photography, as a mobile, seemingly autonomous self in an appropriative relationship to landscape——the paradigm of the modern self, taking a ““view from nowhere”” on a world captured as image. The stability, unity, and autonomy of the Wordsworthian self ultimately depend on these photographic relationships.
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