The Lake Poets and Professional Identity: 71 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Series Number 71)
Cambridge University Press, 8/30/2007
EAN 9780521866385, ISBN10: 0521866383
Hardcover, 312 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
The idea that the inspired poet stands apart from the marketplace is considered central to British Romanticism. However, Romantic authors were deeply concerned with how their occupation might be considered a kind of labour comparable to that of the traditional professions. In the process of defining their work as authors, Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge - the 'Lake school' - aligned themselves with emerging constructions of the 'professional gentleman' that challenged the vocational practices of late eighteenth-century British culture. They modelled their idea of authorship on the learned professions of medicine, church, and law, which allowed them to imagine a productive relationship to the marketplace and to adopt the ways eighteenth-century poets had related their poetry to other kinds of intellectual work. In this work, Goldberg explores the ideas of professional risk, evaluation and competition that the writers developed as a response to a variety of eighteenth-century depictions of the literary career.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
professionalism and the Lake School of Poetry
Part 1. Romanticism, Risk, and Professionalism
1. Cursing Doctor Young, and after
Part II. Genealogies of the Romantic Wanderer
2. Merit and reward in 1729
3. James Beattie and The Minstrel
Part III. Romantic Itinerants
4. Authority and the itinerant cleric
5. William Cowper and the itinerant Lake poet
Part IV. The Lake School, Professionalism, and the Public
6. Robert Southey and the claims of literature
7. 'Ministry more palpable'
Wordsworth's Romantic professionalism
Notes
Bibliography
Index.