Fragments
21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world
Description
Featuring an extended introduction by scholar of British Romanticism, Alan Vardy, Fragments consists of Wordsworth's philosophico-aesthetic prose fragment "The Sublime & the Beautiful" and "Hawkshead & the Ferry." While a fragmented text, unfinished, almost certainly abandoned by the author, the difficulties of the former text no longer appear fatal so much as evidence of Wordsworth's rigorous struggle to come to terms not only with his own aesthetic experiences, but with the philosophical aesthetics of his epoch. What were once read as confusions may now be seen as productive of complex accounts of lived affective experiences. In critical terms, current aesthetic occupations have perhaps finally found Wordsworth's text. By placing the prose fragment in a separate appendix, the original editors of Wordsworth's Prose Works removed it from its actual place in The Unpublished Tour. New analysis of the manuscripts reveals that "The Sublime & the Beautiful" is actually part of the Tour. In reprinting the "Hawkshead & the Ferry" section of the Tour, our edition restores this original context, lost in the standard Oxford edition. The prose fragment begins in the precise place where "Hawkshead & the Ferry" ends - on the west side of Windermere looking north to the Langdale pikes. Were the missing pages of "The Sublime & the Beautiful" to be recovered, the transition from picturesque viewpoint to speculation on the philosophical status of that view would be apparent. Understanding the significance of our affective response to natural objects could not be more central to a Wordsworthian poetics predicated on the internalization of aesthetic sensations into perceptions and ideas, associations of one kind or another, and finally into the very stuff of the poetry. Fragmented or not, this prose treatise on a subject of such centrality to the poet's project can no longer be ignored. It is this general neglect that the present text hopes to address by publishing these fragments on their own for the very first time.
Product Details
Price
$18.00
$16.74
Publisher
Contra Mundum Press
Publish Date
December 03, 2013
Pages
160
Dimensions
7.0 X 10.0 X 0.34 inches | 0.64 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781940625027
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliateAbout the Author
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was an influential English poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age of English literature with the 1798 joint publication of Lyrical Ballads. He was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
Rainer J. Hanshe is a writer and the founder of Contra Mundum Press and the journal Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics. He is the author of two novels, The Acolytes (2010) and The Abdication (2012), and the editor of Richard Foreman's Plays with Films (2013) and Wordsworth's Fragments (2014). He is also the author of the hybrid entity Shattering the Muses (2016), a collaboration with visual artist Federico Gori, Closing Melodies (2023), a phantomatic encounter between Nietzsche & Van Gogh, and Dionysos Speed (2024). Work of his has appeared in Caesura, Sinn und Form, ChrisMarker.org, Asymptote, Black Sun Lit's Vestiges, and elsewhere. In 2016, Petite Plaisance published an Italian translation of his second novel, The Abdication. Shorter and longer works of his have been translated into other languages, and in 2021, the journal Po&sie staged an event at Maison de la poésie in Paris to honor his work. His own translations include Baudelaire's My Heart Laid Bare (2017; 2020), Belgium Stripped Bare (2019), and Paris Spleen (2021), Évelyne Grossman's The Creativity of the Crisis, and Antonin Artaud's Journey to Mexico: Revolutionary Messages, as well as longer and shorter works by other authors. His translation of Léon-Paul Fargue's High Solitude is forthcoming in 2024. Beyond Sense, a vatic exploration of the aphasiac disintegration of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Artaud, is forthcoming in 2025, The Accumulating Wreckage: Poems, Essays, & Other Texts in 2026, and Paris Without End: Assorted Translations From Giacometti to Artaud: 1914-1964 in 2027. He is at work on a new book entitled Humanimality. Author site: literaryabsolute.com
Alan Vardy, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.