"The Dualistic Mind And Poetic Form In Wordsworth's ""prelude"""

In The Prelude, his most sustained work explicitly concerned with mental processes, Wordsworth posits that the healthy mind operates as if it were two--one analytic, the other holistic--and he speaks of having "two consciousnesses," two interactive faculties that together comprise the mind. Wordsworth's efforts to devise a literary form that dramatizes mental processes as he sees them anticipate many twentieth-century techniques in poetry and fiction, and his speculations about consciousness resemble the theories of physiologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and educators who study the interactions between the two hemispheres of the brain. If current theories about the mind are accurate, they enable us to see various features of Wordsworth's poetry as serving a single, though complex, purpose, and they suggest a way of viewing Romanticism in general as a broad cultural rediscovery of the value of the eccentric and quirky mental processes now believed to reside in the right hemisphere of the human brain.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Davis, James Phillip

• Literature, English

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8721621

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/69461