Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry

BRAND NEW FIRST EDITION dust jacket hardcover, clean text, solid binding, NO remainders NOT ex-library slight shelfwear / storage-wear; WE SHIP FAST. Carefully packed and quickly sent. 201601760 In reexamining David Simpson’s critical corpus on British romanticism—beginning with Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (MacMillan, 1979) and Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (MacMillian, 1982), and continuing with Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination (Methuen, 1988)—we find his most characteristic and repeated move to be a determined rejection of what we would now call “old historicism.” Simpson’s rejection of historicism—and his career in general—follow a trajectory similar to that of romantic the late-seventies, high-deconstructive Irony and Authority rejects any search for origins as being driven “ultimately [by] a myth of authority” (x); the late-eighties, Foucault-indebted Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination locates traditional historical method “within what we might roughly think of as the ‘Marxist’ tradition, which tends to work with pre-established causal vocabularies that, ironically enough, often pre-empt a sense of the need to recover the precise features of a historical moment” (11). Simpson’s resistance to a totalizing reading of romantic poetry, in other words, has evolved into assumptions that we have come to identify with New Historicism; in resisting what he has come to call “theory”—defined as a critical approach whose way of seeing not only limits the ways in which it can approach a text but also what it can value in one—Simpson, we might say, has been a critic in search of a “method.” As a study of the origins of British aversion and American ambivalence to method, Simpson’s most recent book will prove most interesting to romanticists as an embodiment of the romantic “methods." We recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available. (No shipping to Mexico, Brazil or Italy.)