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Re-enactment and Romanticism: Wordsworth, Southey, and R.G. Collingwood's An Autobiography (1939).

Wordsworth called The Prelude 'the history of a Poet's mind'. But what, this essay asks, is the weight of the word 'history' here? Does a poem 'enshrining ... the spirit of the Past / For future restoration' match R.G. Collingwood's demanding mid-twentieth-century account of history as 're-enactment...

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Published in:Romanticism Vol. 31; no. 2; pp. 197 - 214
Main Author: Duggett, Tom
Format: Article
Published: Edinburgh University Press Jul2025
Subjects:
Literary criticism
Conceptual history
Historicism
Thought experiments
Autobiography
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        atl: Re-enactment and Romanticism: Wordsworth, Southey, and R.G. Collingwood's An Autobiography (1939).
      aug:
        au: Duggett, Tom
        affil:
          Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
          University of Liverpool
      su:
        Literary criticism
        Conceptual history
        Historicism
        Thought experiments
        Autobiography
      sug:
        subj:
          Literary criticism
          Conceptual history
          Historicism
          Thought experiments
          Autobiography
      keyword:
        Collingwood
        history
        memory
        re-enactment
        Southey
        Wordsworth
      ab: Wordsworth called The Prelude 'the history of a Poet's mind'. But what, this essay asks, is the weight of the word 'history' here? Does a poem 'enshrining ... the spirit of the Past / For future restoration' match R.G. Collingwood's demanding mid-twentieth-century account of history as 're-enactment', the present rethinking of past thought? Myself repeating Alan Liu's thought experiment with re-enactment in a series of suggestive footnotes in Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989), I attempt here to (re)forge a Wordsworth-Collingwood connection, reviving – at least prospectively – one abandoned Romantic new historicist itinerary. Asking both how far Wordsworth contributes to this genealogy of historicism, and what may be gained for understanding Collingwood's An Autobiography (1939) by attending to the encapsulation of the Lake Poets within it, this essay proposes re-enactment – as influential and controversial as ever – as a key concept for literary history of the humane, imaginative kind.
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    language: English
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