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Chapter 1 - Mediating the Modern

Wordsworth’s Liturgical Subjectivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2024

Joseph McQueen
Affiliation:
Northwest University
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Summary

The liturgical forms depicted in William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) provide the foundational instance of the nineteenth-century resistance to excarnation and the natural/supernatural binary. Rather than naturalizing otherworldly Christian doctrines – as seminal readings of Romanticism suppose – The Excursion’s rituals disclose how material reality already participates in the divine. This participatory vision challenges voluntarist pictures of God as a large, powerful being who exercises his arbitrary will over creation – a picture of God often unwittingly adopted by modern readers. Divine participation, moreover, challenges typical readings of Wordsworth’s lyrical inwardness. For, liturgy not only draws the poem’s characters out of themselves, it also sacralizes nature. Nature’s sacredness in turn opposes the desecrating rituals – or anti-liturgies – of industrialization. Via liturgy, then, Wordsworth comments on material conditions and remains historically engaged. The Victorians will repeatedly echo this use of liturgy to sacralize material reality and to resist any forces that would violate that sacrality.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Mediating the Modern
  • Joseph McQueen, Northwest University
  • Book: Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
  • Online publication: 14 November 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009435932.002
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  • Mediating the Modern
  • Joseph McQueen, Northwest University
  • Book: Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
  • Online publication: 14 November 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009435932.002
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Mediating the Modern
  • Joseph McQueen, Northwest University
  • Book: Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
  • Online publication: 14 November 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009435932.002
Available formats
×