The orphaned imagination : melancholy and commodity culture in English romanticism
Challenges standard accounts of Romantic poetry. This title argues that Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge - each of whom suffered the loss of a father or father-figure at an early age - possessed an orphan's special insight into the dynamics and aesthetics of commodity culture and its symptomatic melancholia.
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xi, 307 pages ; 24 cm
9780822322054, 9780822322214, 0822322056, 0822322218
38061639
Byron's in-between art of ennui: "The world is full of orphans"
Spectral generation in The Four Zoas: "Indolence and mourning sit hovring"
Shelley's absent fathers: "The awful shadow of some unseen power"
Depression and vocation in the 1805 Prelude: "The homeless voice of waters."