1st Edition
The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form
By D.B. Ruderman
Copyright 2016
288 Pages
by
Routledge
288 Pages
7 B/W Illustrations
by
Routledge
This book radically refigures the conceptual and formal significance of childhood in nineteenth-century English poetry. By theorizing infancy as a poetics as well as a space of continual beginning, Ruderman shows how it allowed poets access to inchoate, uncanny, and mutable forms of subjectivity and art. While recent historicist studies have documented the "freshness of experience" childhood... Read more
Introduction: "Infant Bud of Being"
1. "Blank Misgivings": Infancy in Wordsworth’s Ode
2. "When I First Saw the Child": Reverie in Erasmus Darwin and Coleridge
3. Merging and Emerging in the Work of Sara Coleridge
4. Bodies in Dissolve: Animal Magnetism and Infancy in Shelley
5. Stillborn Poetics and Tennyson’s Songs
Afterword: "An Echo to the Self": Augusta Webster’s Psychoanalytic Thought
Biography
David Ruderman is Assistant Professor of English at The Ohio State University, USA.
