Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production

This book explores Wordsworth s professionalization as a writer in relation to the cultural and economic ascendancy of the English middle class between 1740 and 1820. Its wide-ranging interpretations are coordinated by a single, albeit highly ramified, critical hypothesis: that Romanticism s aesthetic forms simultaneously afforded the middle classes an imaginary furlough from the impinging consciousness of their tenuous socio-economic status. Wordsworth s Profession analyzes and correlates changing paradigms of authorship, poetic genre, and tone with the demographic and spiritual aspects of middle-class life during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first of three parts explores Wordsworth s early descriptive poetry (An Evening Walk, Descriptive Sketches, and Tinturn Abbey) in relation to inherited and contiguous aesthetic forms and practices, such as the landscapes of Lorrain and Gainsborough, Kant s theory of aesthetic communities, and the institutions of domestic tourism and the Picturesque in late-eighteenth-century England.