UVM Theses and Dissertations
Format:
Print
Author:
Donaghey, Brendan
Dept./Program:
English
Year:
2013
Degree:
M.A.
Abstract:
My thesis presents the argument that William Wordsworth's poem "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798" anticipates current ecocritical concerns over nature as a necessarily distancing concept by almost two centuries. Engaging primarily with the critical works of Timothy Morton, Karl Kroeber, James McKusick, and James Chandler, I will explore how Wordsworth's poem attempts to resolve nature as distancing though a "green poetics" predicated upon erecting and dissolving boundaries between apparently contradictory images. Through close textual analysis I will show how Wordsworth's initially successful strategy is ultimately unable to rescue nature from a position of "over there."