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Fleeing the Machine: Wordsworth, Romantic Nature, and the Rejection of Urban Industrial Life

Author(s) G. Yadagiri
Country India
Abstract This paper examines William Wordsworth's poetic response to the rise of industrial capitalism and urban expansion in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It positions Wordsworth's turn toward nature not as simple escapism but as a deliberate ethical and psychological counter-discourse to the mechanization of experience. Tracing how poems such as “Tintern Abbey,” The Prelude, and “Michael” articulate an alternative model of selfhood grounded in memory, continuity, and organic relation to place, the study draws on the historical scholarship of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson alongside the ecocritical and new historicist frameworks of Jonathan Bate, Marjorie Levinson, and Alan Liu. It situates Wordsworth's rural imagination within the material conditions of enclosure, factory labor, and urban migration that reshaped England during his lifetime, arguing that his rejection of the “machine”—understood both literally as industrial technology and figuratively as a mechanized, alienated mode of consciousness—constitutes a sustained critique of modernity's effects on perception and community. The paper closes by weighing objections that this pastoral vision obscures the economic transformations it responds to, and by assessing the continuing relevance of Wordsworth's ecological imagination to contemporary environmental and cultural criticism.
Keywords William Wordsworth, Romanticism, industrialization, ecocriticism, pastoral poetry, The Prelude.
Published In Volume 13, Issue 6, June 2022
Published On 2022-06-04
DOI https://doi.org/10.71097/IJTAS.v13.i6.1385
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Crossref DOI prefix of IJTAS is 10.71097/IJTAS

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