Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth's Narrative Experiments

Abstract

Informed by a "poetics of speech" developed from the work of the Bakhtin School, this book offers an alternative to the Aristotelian emphasis on narrative as the presentation of plot that highlights narrative as someone's relating of words, deeds, or experiences to someone else. With special attention to reported speech, it offers appreciative readings of Wordsworth's experimental narrative poems that Coleridge denigrated, readings of the poems in which Wordsworth grapples with the expectations of a "tale," and readings of the versions of Wordsworth's encounter with the discharged soldier on the high road