Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession

by Susan Eilenberg

Overview

This book explores the relationship between tropes of literary property and signification in the writings and literary politics of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Eilenberg argues that a complex of ideas about property, propriety, and possession sets the terms for the two writers' mutually revisionary efforts and informs the images of literary authority, textual identity, and poetic figuration evident in their major works. Eilenberg's readings of the collaboration and its principle texts bring to bear a combination of deconstructive, psychoanalytic, and both new and literary historical methods. The book provides a deeper understanding of the relationship between two of the major figures of English Romanticism as well as fresh insight into what is at stake in the analogy between the verbal and the material or the literary and the economic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195068566
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/27/1992
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 8.56(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

State University of New York, Buffalo

Table of Contents

	Frequently Cited Texts	xxi
I	The Lyrical Ballads: Imagination's Entitlement
1	The Propriety of the Lyrical Ballads	3
2	Voice and Ventriloquy in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner	31
3	The Poetry of Property	60
4	"Michael," "Christabel," and the Poetry of Possession	87
5	The Haunted Language of the Lucy Poems	108
II	Afterwards: Imaginations in Division
6	The Heterogeneity of the Biographia Literaria	139
7	The Impropriety of the Imagination	168
8	Mortal Pages: Wordsworth and the Reform of Copyright	192
	Conclusion	213
	Notes	217
	Index	269

Editorial Reviews

"A work that is stimulating, articulate, and theoretically sophisticated without being precious or needlessly obscure. Strange Power of Speech offers a fresh and challenging approach to the old problem of the whys and wherefores of the collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge."—South Atlantic Review

"Her discussion is laid out across a wide and imaginative range....This is a demanding, conceptually exciting book."—Choice

"Eilenberg writes intelligently and persuasively about Wordsworth's and Coleridge's differing attitudes to language, property, possession, originality, authority....The arguments...are complex, subtle, learned, and powerfully expressed (in language largely free of jargon)."—English Literature

"One of those rare works that is at once brilliantly articulated in detail and powerful in its implications for literary studies....Eilenberg's work will take its place at the head of many recent works on intertextual, dialogic, or collaborative creation....It will stand out not simply as a masterful application of theories previously existing, but as a work which breaks new ground and sets a new agenda."—Paul A. Magnuson, New York University

"Although a great deal has been written about the personal and literary relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, the lexicon and much of the material that Eilenberg brings over to the subjects are found to be irresistibly useful....What makes Strange Power of Speech profitable to read is its easy intelligence and lively style. That it does not pay homage to one critical ideology or another is to its credit. You can actually get a sense of Wordsworth and Coleridge both as writers and persons in this book....I am enriched to have this book as my property while being possessed by it."—ANQ

From the Publisher