Authoring the Self

Abstract

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...

William Cowper's Wokeness

“…As Scott Hess puts it, Cowper poetry "replaces a public politics with a political model based on private imaginative acts," one that insists "patriotic sensibility, indulged in individual retirement, is legitimately equal (if not superior) to direct political action." 69 Perhaps this is the sort of armchair activism held in ill regard by modern activists resentful of the performativity of wokeness and various columnists skeptical about the efficacy of social media as a means for revolution. 70 Cowper's fascination with the newspaper as an interactive ledger certainly speaks to this age of digital activism; as critics have pointed out, Cowper's politicism, couched in a poetic sensibility of bold personality, entailed mining from the newspaper fodder for poetry that might subsequently land the poet himself in the news, and though Cowper never measured his success in terms of print sales, his success hinged on the whims of a readership from which he remained spiritually estranged.…”

“…70 Cowper's fascination with the newspaper as an interactive ledger certainly speaks to this age of digital activism; as critics have pointed out, Cowper's politicism, couched in a poetic sensibility of bold personality, entailed mining from the newspaper fodder for poetry that might subsequently land the poet himself in the news, and though Cowper never measured his success in terms of print sales, his success hinged on the whims of a readership from which he remained spiritually estranged. 71 If Cowper lived in our modern age, it might not be unimaginable to find The Task disseminated 280 characters at a time on Twitter.…”