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Author Gurton-Wachter, Lily, 1980- author.

Title Watchwords : Romanticism and the poetics of attention / Lily Gurton-Wachter
Published Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2016]
©2016

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Introduction : attention's disciplines -- Reading, a double attention -- The poetics of alarm & the passion of listening -- Bent earthwards : Wordsworth's poetics of the interval -- "That something living is abroad" : missing the point in Beachy Head -- Attention's aches in Keats's Hyperion poems -- Afterword : just looking
Summary This book revisits British Romanticism as a poetics of heightened attention. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as Britain was on the alert for a possible French invasion, attention became a phenomenon of widespread interest, one that aligned and distinguished an unusual range of fields (including medicine, aesthetics, theology, ethics, pedagogy, and politics). Within this wartime context, the Romantic aesthetic tradition appears as a response to a crisis in attention caused by demands on both soldiers and civilians to keep watch. Close formal readings of the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, (Charlotte) Smith, and Wordsworth, in conversation with research into Enlightenment philosophy and political and military discourses, suggest the variety of forces competing for--or commanding--attention in the period. This new framework for interpreting Romanticism and its legacy illuminates what turns out to be an ongoing tradition of war literature that, rather than give testimony to or represent warfare, uses rhythm and verse to experiment with how and what we attend to during times of war.--Publisher website
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes English
Print version record
Subject English poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism
Authors and readers -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
Attention -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
Romanticism -- Great Britain
Poetics.
Literature -- Philosophy.
POETRY -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
Literature -- Philosophy
Attention
Authors and readers
English poetry
Poetics
Romanticism
Englisch
Lyrik
Romantik
Aufmerksamkeit Motiv
Great Britain
Genre/Form Electronic books
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2015034983
ISBN 9780804798761
0804798761