After Wordsworth: Global Revisions of the English Poet

After Wordsworth reads the fraught relationships between the English poet and his global Anglophone audience, for whom he was an inspiration and a burden--often at the same time. Where other scholars, both Romanticist and otherwise, have analyzed the afterlives of Romanticism in a teleological straight path from life to afterlife, my dissertation turns this path into a round-trip. By connecting the trajectory of life and afterlife in a circuit, I argue that William Wordsworth's appearances in a variety of genres and locales--from political tracts to memoirs, from New England to the Amazon--do not just produce a reception history. Rather, they uncover the ambivalent Englishness of Wordsworth's own writing.;The dissertation opens with a primal scene: the common childhood experience, especially in the colonies of the British empire, of memorizing and reciting Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud." In Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy (1990), this experience inspires the title character's immediate hatred for daffodils. But in chapter one I argue that rather than repudiating Wordsworth's poetry, Kincaid in My Garden (Book): (1999) shares Wordsworth's struggle in his Guide to the Lakes (1835) to express the relationship between local stasis and colonial movement through the contested and artificial space of the garden. In chapter two I examine J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) and contest the critical assumption that it uses Wordsworth's Prelude (1805) merely to indicate the irrelevance of what Coetzee calls in White Writing "the quintessentially European posture of reader vis-a-vis environment." In chapter three I examine the abolitionist afterlife of Wordsworth in the political writings of antebellum activist Lydia Maria Child, who musters Wordsworth's Excursion (1814) in support of her comprehensive anti-slavery agenda--an agenda that Wordsworth seldom considered. In my concluding chapter I suggest that Wordsworth's representativeness, his ability to stand for moral, geographical, and national spheres beyond those which he actually inhabited in his writing, has in part a strange and paradoxical source: it has been constructed since the 1790s by the Wordsworth family. Both then and now, the Wordsworth family labors reveal that the poet's preeminence is a result of his representativeness, a quality that requires a familial infrastructure ready to subsume itself under the banner of Wordsworth.