The Global Wordsworth: Romanticism Out of Place

The Global Wordsworth examines Anglophone writers who repurposed William Wordsworth’s poetry. By reading Wordsworth in dialog with J. M. Coetzee, Lydia Maria Child, and Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine Bergren revitalizes our understanding of Wordsworth’s career and its place in the canon. Always considered the most provincial of the great Romantics, this study argues that Wordsworth’s afterlives in former British colonies reveal a poet whose career came to see and represent the local, the national, and the global not as separate spheres, but as entangled by forces of British imperialism and colonial expansion. By examining Wordsworth through his afterlives, Bergren argues that he saw and represented England as increasingly contingent on a world beyond its shores. She addresses the effects of imperialism and capitalistic exchange on the appearance and meaning of that England, in both British Romanticism and the literatures of a world remade by imperial forces.