Romantic form and new historicism

Wordsworth's "lines written a few miles above Tintern abbey"

Alan Rawes

pp. 95-115

in: Alan Rawes (ed), Romanticism and form, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

These are some of the big claims with which Jerome McGann famously inaugurated the new historicist transformation of Romantic Studies. From the start, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey" was one of new histor-icism's exemplary texts. For McGann himself, Tintern Abbey" perfectly demonstrates the kind of "poetic conceptualization" that for him characterises Romantic literature, "whereby the actual human issues with which the poetry is concerned are resituated in a variety of idealized locations".¹

Cited authors

Wordsworth William

McGann Jerome