Bücher von Andrew (University of Bristol) Bennett

This book engages with literary, philosophical, historical and sociological perspectives on suicide, while also engaging with medical humanities and offering detailed analyses of key literary texts from the long twentieth century. It is aimed at a wide audience of literary academics and students of literature and cultural studies.

This 1999 book examines the way in which the Romantic period's culture of posterity inaugurates a tradition of writing which demands that the poet should write for an audience of the future: the true poet, a figure of neglected genius, can be properly appreciated only after death. Andrew Bennett argues that this involves a radical shift in the conceptualization of the poet and poetic reception, with wide-ranging implications for the poetry and poetics of the Romantic period. He surveys the contexts for this transformation of the relationship between poet and audience, engaging with issues such as the commercialization of poetry, the gendering of the canon, and the construction of poetic identity. Bennett goes on to discuss the strangely compelling effects which this reception theory produces in the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron, who have come to embody, for posterity, the figure of the Romantic poet.

Andrew Bennett challenges the popular conception of Wordsworth as a writer who didn't so much write poetry as compose it aloud or in his head. This sustained attention to the question of writing in Wordsworth produces compelling readings of the major poems.