Wordsworth's Slumber and the Problematics of Reading

A critical study of the interpretive problems surrounding readings of one of Wordsworths best-known lyrics. Wordsworths Slumber and the Problematics of Reading engages in detail both the nature and the implications of what can be called literary pragmatics. It offers a new interpretation of Wordsworths A slumber did my spirit seal as well as Strange fits of passion and She dwelt among untrodden ways, making a major contribution to an ongoing interpretive debate concerning the first poem and the theoretical issues to which is gives rise. It also provides new ways to contextualize Wordsworths so-called Lucy poems as well as Coleridges appropriations of them in 1799. Caraher analyzes solipsism and strange fantasies of death as they surface in readings of Wordsworths lyric and provides critical examinations of the rhetoric, assumptions, and evidences of reading on the part of many of Wordsworths most famous critics. He then makes a strong case for the theoretical viability of the work of John Dewey and Stephen Pepper for the field of literary studies, especially for theories of literary reading, theories of evidence, and the logic of literary inquiry. Carahers identification of the problematic of Wordsworths poem gives direction to a powerful inquiry into the poems meanings, its readers judgments, and its cultures pathologies. He makes a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion concerning pragmatism in literary studies and to the understanding of Wordsworth and the theory of reading.