Description
Book SynopsisReading Wordsworth - and Rousseau before him - from the perspective of recent debates about the political and social rights of the homeless, Celeste Langan argues that both literature and vagrancy are surprisingly rich and disturbing images of the 'negative freedom' at the heart of liberalism.
Trade Review'This is an extraordinarily important, exhilarating and brilliant piece of work on Wordsworth, and one of the most interesting pieces of critical inquiry on any subject I have read in some time.' Alan Liu
'This volume is so rich in its range of reference, so varied in the modes of analysis it offers, and so thickly punctuated by the analogies it uses as its method, that it is certain to offer much to any reader interested in the philosophical and historical origins of liberalism, and their place within the formation of poetic subject in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.' British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments; List of abbreviations; A methodological preamble; Introduction; 1. Rousseau plays the beggar: the last words of citizen subject; 2. Money walks: Wordsworth and the right to wander; 3. Walking and talking at the same time: the 'two histories' of The Prelude; 4. The walking cure; Notes; Works cited; Index.
