Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Palgrave Macmillan

The Revolutionary 'I'

Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation

  • Book
  • © 1998

Overview

Authors:
  1. Ashton Nichols

    1. Dickinson College, Carlisle, USA

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Part of the book series: Romanticism in Perspective:Texts, Cultures, Histories (ROPTCH)

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

Log in via an institution
eBook USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xx
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Silencing the (Other) Self: Wordsworth as ‘Wordsworth!’ in ‘There was a boy’

    • Ashton Nichols
    Pages 1-28

  3. The Politics of Self-Presentation: Wordsworth as Revolutionary Actor in a Literary Drama

    • Ashton Nichols
    Pages 29-55

  4. Sounds into Speech: the Two-Part Prelude of 1799 as Dialogic Dramatic Monologue

    • Ashton Nichols
    Pages 56-77

  5. Coleridge as Catalyst to Autobiography: the Wordsworthian Self as Therapeutic Gift, 1804–5

    • Ashton Nichols
    Pages 78-101

  6. Dialogizing Dorothy: Voicing the Feminine as Spousal Sister in The Prelude

    • Ashton Nichols
    Pages 102-131

  7. Colonizing Consciousness: Culture as Identity in Wordsworth’s Prelude and Walcott’s Another Life

    • Ashton Nichols
    Pages 132-150

  8. Back Matter

    Pages 151-187
    Download chapter PDF
Back to top

Keywords

About this book

In the winter of 1798-99, shut up in the freezing German town of Goslar, William Wordsworth began producing a series of lyrical fragments that appeared first in letters written to Coleridge and emerged eventually as source texts for The Prelude . These lyrics are revolutionary because they construct a new version of the autobiographical 'I'. The Revolutionary 'I' explores the numerous voices of the poetic speaker 'Wordsworth' and their relationship to the historical figure who shared the same name.

Reviews

Ashton Nichols's The Revolutionary 'I ' trawls through versions of The Prelude up to and including the 1805 text in search of a fundamental Wordsworthian orgininality, which he believes is a generative source of most subsequent imaginative literature in English...he believes that Prelude breaks new autobiographical ground with its presentation of the I as a dramatized cultural self rather merely a mimetic revelation of identity.' - James Treadwell, The Wordsworth Circle

Authors and Affiliations

  • Dickinson College, Carlisle, USA

    Ashton Nichols

About the author

Ashton Nichols is Associate Professor of English at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Back to top

Search

Navigation