Description
Book SynopsisWordsworth has traditionally been understood as the ''poet of memory''. This book argues that ''unremembered pleasure'', an idea Wordsworth formulates in ''Tintern Abbey'' but is often overlooked by modern readers, is central to understanding his writing. Wordsworth''s poems discover and articulate a broad range of previously unfelt, unnoticed, and unconscious satisfactions. As well as providing new interpretations of major and under-studied writing by Wordsworth, this volume challenges a long tradition of psychoanalytic reading of romanticism, which uses trauma to explain the limits of literary memory. The book contests key psychoanalytic concepts in literary criticism including repression, sublimation, mourning, and pleasure. It asks what it would mean for us to be ''surprised by joy''.
Trade ReviewThe freshness, aptitude, thoughtfulness and delicacy with which Freer pursues these twin trajectories – engaging psychoanalysis in order better to articulate how Wordsworth departs from it... [A] thoughtful, nuanced and perceptive dialogue between Wordsworth and Freud. * Matt ffytche, Romantic Circles *
Freer demonstrates especially moving, lyrical readings, where the consequences of his thinking seem to gesture beyond the specificity of the writing. [...] Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure ... demonstrates the extent to which our Romantic readings of the unnoticed can often produce powerful pleasures that wrestle with our appropriative glances and feelings, those we cast at a past that is not entirely ours to begin with but to which we feel complexly indebted. * Jacques Khalip, the Wordsworth Circle *
Table of ContentsPreface Introduction: Wordsworth after Freud 1: Unremembered Pleasure 2: The Infancy of Affection 3: Metrical Pleasures 4: Sustaining Elegy 5: Happiness in Time Conclusion Bibliography Index
