William Wordsworth And Modern Travel

This book explores Wordsworth’s extraordinary influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of railways, motorcars and the First World War. It reveals how Wordsworth’s response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by both advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of transport. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth’s patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage – a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period, when popular motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. This book explores how patterns of tourist behaviour and environmental awareness changed in the century of popular tourism, examining how Wordsworth’s vision and language shaped modern ideas of travel, self-reliance, landscape and environment, cultural heritage, preservation and accessibility.

In her study of the opening of the English Lake District to mass tourism, Saeko Yoshikawa examines William Wordsworth's role in the rise and development of the region as a popular destination. Informed by extensive archival work, her book provides an original case study of the contributions of Romantic writers to the invention of middle-class touri

There is a long-held view that Wordsworth's inspiration dried up before the age of forty. This book opposes that view by examining the substantial body of poetry written after his fiftieth year. The argument is that, in order to appreciate this work, much of which was inspired by itineraries in Britain and in Europe, we have to read the poems as they were first published. By adopting the perspective of the contemporary reader, Wordsworth's grand design can be appreciated.

In William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship, Scott Hess explores Wordsworth’s defining role in establishing what he designates as "the ecology of authorship": a primarily middle-class, nineteenth-century conception of nature associated with aesthetics, high culture, individualism, and nation. Instead of viewing Wordsworth as an early ecologist, Hess places him within a context that is largely cultural and aesthetic. The supposedly universal Wordsworthian vision of nature, Hess argues, was in this sense specifically male, middle-class, professional, and culturally elite—factors that continue to shape the environmental movement today.

At the heart of Wordsworth's concerns is the question of how travel - both foreign and everyday - might also become an adventure into philosophy itself. This is an art of travel both as an approach to experience - one that draws on habits in order to revise them in the shock of new - and as a poetic approach that gives voice to the singular and foreign through the unique shapes of verse. Close readings of Wordsworth's 'pictures of Nature, Man, and Society' show how the natural is entangled with - and not simply opposed to, as many critics have suggested - the social, the political and the historical in this verse. This book draws on both eighteenth-century anthropology and travel literature, and debates in modern critical theory, to highlight Wordsworth's remarkable originality and his ongoing ability to transform our theoretical prejudgements in the unknown territory of the travel encounter.

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth's poetry, other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion, and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

In her study of the opening of the English Lake District to mass tourism, Saeko Yoshikawa examines William Wordsworth’s role in the rise and development of the region as a popular destination. For the middle classes on holiday, guidebooks not only offered practical information, but they also provided a fresh motive and a new model of appreciation by associating writers with places. The nineteenth century saw the invention of Robert Burns’s and Walter Scott’s Borders, Shakespeare’s Stratford, and the Brontë Country as holiday locales for the middle classes. Investigating the international cult of Wordsworthian tourism, Yoshikawa shows both how Wordsworth’s public celebrity was constructed through the tourist industry and how the cultural identity of the Lake District was influenced by the poet’s presence and works. Informed by extensive archival work, her book provides an original case study of the contributions of Romantic writers to the invention of middle-class tourism and the part guidebooks played in promoting the popular reputations of authors.

With essays by Gloria Anzaldúa, Jean Baudrillard, William Bevis, Homi Bhabha, Michel Butor, Hélène Cixous, Erik Cohen, Michel de Certeau, Wayne Franklin, Paul Fussell, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Caren Kaplan, Eric Leed, Dean MacCannell, Doreen Massey, Carl Pedersen, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, Mary Louise Pratt, R. Radhakrishnan, Edward W. Said, and Thayer Scudder Travel, movement, mobility--these are some of the essential activities in human life. Whether we travel to foreign lands or just across the city, we all journey, and from our journeying we shape ourselves, our history, and the stories we tell. In essays written by some of the most respected contemporary scholars, this anthology brings together some of the best informed convictions about travel. Travel, so essential to human life, is a complex matter that encompasses a variety of travel experiences--family vacation, political exile, exploration of distant lands, immigration, mundane shopping trips. Likewise, as the essays in the collection demonstrate, discussion of travel crosses a range of personal and theoretical perspectives--from the postmodern sensibility of Jean Baudrillard to R. Radhakrishnan's explanation to his son of what it means for Indians to live in the United States. As the field of travel itself "travels" across academic and theoretical boundaries, it brings together sociology, anthropology, geography, history, psychology, and literary criticism. Recognizing that multidimensional quality of travel, this book gathers essays that represent various travel experiences and approaches to discussing them. Mapping out definitions of travel, the collection includes essays on tourism and travel writing, on modern globalization and the diaspora, on immigration, migration, and forced relocation. Defining Travel also highlights American experiences of mobility by including essays on Native Americans and early contact with the New World, as well as the massive migration of African Americans to northern cities. Running throughout the essays are sometimes conflicting discussions about what constitutes travel and the homesite, the role of travel, knowledge, and power, especially when travel is accompanied by imperialistic motives. Here readers truly will discover that the essence of human life is wayfaring. Susan L. Roberson, an assistant professor of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery, is the editor of Women, America, and Movement: Narratives of Relocation and author of Emerson in His Sermons: A Man-Made Self.