TY - JOUR
AU - Hickey,, Alison
AB - In The Excursion and Wordsworth’s Iconography, Brandon Yen argues that seemingly insignificant ‘local details’ in Wordsworth’s poetry harbor cultural meanings that connect them to a shared iconographical landscape. The book combines analysis of The Excursion and other Wordsworth poems with an in-depth examination of iconographical imagery from post-1789 and earlier sources, including both concrete verbal references and pictorial images such as cartoons from the popular press, book illustrations, and political prints. Reproductions of the pictorial images are generously supplied throughout the book. Yen unearths the layers of meaning contained in The Excursion’s images and traces their accretion of significance through ‘recurrence and complex interplay’ within the poem and throughout Wordsworth’s corpus (p. 13). A welcome addition to Liverpool University Press’s ‘Romantic Reconfigurations’ series, the book affirms The Excursion’s vital contribution to Wordsworth’s overarching themes of ‘paradise lost and paradise regained in the post-revolutionary context’ (p. 36). The Excursion introduces the Solitary after his revolutionary vision has been shattered; his life story, and the Wanderer’s and Pastor’s attempts to re-integrate him into the new reality of the post-revolutionary world, unfold in relation to commonplace narratives of revolutionary history as a fall from the innocence of pre-lapsarian hope to the experience of post-lapsarian disillusionment and travail. These narrative representations share elements drawn from a common literary, pictorial, and cultural landscape. Yen adopts the term ‘iconography’ to refer to them, citing the foundational work of Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich and looking also to Malcolm Andrews, Simon Schama, and others to guide his own excavation of cultural meanings that would otherwise remain hidden because we do not possess the ‘shared sensitivity to the allusive forces’ that made their significance readily accessible to those of their time (p. 5). As he acknowledges in his Introduction, image in its restricted sense commonly refers to the representation of a particular physical object; iconography connects particular physical objects with recognizable cultural meanings. In Yen’s expanded sense, images encompass ‘additional’ meanings: The words used to shape images, the narrative contexts in which images are placed, the intratextual and intertextual recurrence of images, and the verbal and visual interplay between one image and another—all of these endow poetic images with additional meanings, setting them free from any strictly ‘literal’ bond with particular physical entities. (p. 4) Important here is not only that images are ‘free’ from the ‘literal’ bond (poetic images are rarely strictly literal, as Yen points out) but also how the bond is loosened: through ‘shaping’, ‘recurrence’, and ‘interplay’. Images function in a realm of processes and fluid ideas, one in which the literal and the figurative flow into each another. The importance of processes is reflected in the book’s organization into chapters called ‘Envisioning’, ‘Rooting’, ‘Dwelling’, and ‘Flowing and Reflecting’. The evocative gerunds seem to run counter to the book title, in which the term ‘Iconography’ might lead one to expect a catalogue raisonné of such culturally constructed images as The Tree or The Cottage. But Yen’s interest extends beyond concrete images and their iconographical meanings to images as they ‘embody the ideas of…rooting, dwelling’, and so forth (p. 3, my emphasis). Yen connects these to the ‘active principle’, which the Wanderer deems central to redemption. To regain a sense of ‘belonging’ in the post-revolutionary world, the Solitary must emerge from his passivity—must actively envision, take root, dwell, flow, and reflect (p. 36). After chapter 1’s overview of ‘Themes and Iconography’, each chapter explores one category of ‘active’ ‘ideas’, focusing on images, processes, and the dynamic interaction of the two. Chapter 2, ‘Envisioning’, contends that the Solitary’s seemingly ‘collateral’ vision in Book 2 becomes centrally important in The Excursion as it recurs in contexts that amplify its iconographical connections. The Wanderer calls on the same iconography in his subsequent ‘revisiting—and re-fashioning—of the Solitary’s vision’ in hopes of restoring meaning to his life in the post-revolutionary world (p. 37). As Yen notes, ‘images, already laden with cultural, literary, and political meanings, absorbed a new sense of topical urgency in post-1789 Britain’. Thus, for example, ‘trees and cottages became “symptoms” of a longing for rootedness and belonging, whilst damaged seeds and vapours could indicate fears of deracination’ (p. 13). Each of the book’s core chapters explores both the images and the thoughts and feelings of which they are ‘symptoms’, and in doing so highlights the crucial role of images in establishing the common ground on which the poetry communicates with its wider cultural contexts. Chapter 3, ‘Rooting’, interweaves analysis of the iconography of trees with exploration of the idea of ‘rooting’ as an expression of humanity’s post-Edenic need to cultivate ways of inhabiting a fallen world. The chapter builds towards a virtuosic reading of the Wanderer’s Book 8 vision of a cosmopolitan oak (the oak image, though merely implicit in the published poem, is explicit in DC MS 73). The conflicting ideas and forces operating on an individual and historical level come together around this enduring but embattled image, which represents the Wanderer’s ‘ultimate attempt to furnish roots for the Solitary’s “damaged seed”, and to rejuvenate his “naked branches”, without exposing him to the deracinating forces of revolution and war and–more urgently in The Excursion’s post-revolutionary context—of industrial capitalism’ (p. 191). ‘Dwelling’, the title and subject of Chapter 4, encompasses both dwelling as an idea and dwellings such as cottages. Images of dwelling(s), common throughout Wordsworth’s life and work, feature most prominently in The Excursion, where they are crucial to the project of restoring the Solitary. The Solitary’s Lakeland home represents his post-revolutionary—and quasi-counter-revolutionary—‘iconographical refiguring’ of his pre-revolutionary home; The Wanderer and the Pastor, in turn, attempt to ‘reconfigure the Solitary’s naked cottage and mind’ (p. 213) to foster a sense of dwelling in this world. Yen traces these ‘reconfigurings’ within the poem and demonstrates the importance of their iconographical history and contemporary contexts. Like the ‘Rooting’ chapter, the ‘Dwelling’ chapter gives an exhaustive account of images, their layered meanings, and their function as interwoven elements of The Excursion. When, after almost two dozen pages of densely packed analysis of the Devon Cottage, the Lakeland Cottage, and assorted other cottages, the author states that he ‘will go on to consider the iconographical significance of a series of cottage images in The Excursion’ (p. 213), the reader checks to ascertain how many pages remain (forty-one), and whether they include any pictures (yes, ten). Although even the fittest audience is unlikely to wish it any longer, the chapter affords numerous fresh perspectives and revelations. The same holds for each chapter and for the entire book: the reward lies in the steady accumulation of insights and in the deftly orchestrated moments that reveal their interconnectedness and larger significance. The final chapter is intriguing but relatively brief, perhaps in part because ‘Flowing and Reflecting’ are already common objects of critical attention. Some images in this chapter invite further reflection, but Yen leaves those for another day, bringing to a close the most ambitious, learned, wide-ranging, and important book on The Excursion to date, one that firmly establishes the poem as the central text in Wordsworth’s re-imagining of British iconographic tradition and his reconfiguring of the post-revolutionary landscape. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press 2019; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - BRANDON C. YEN. The Excursion and Wordsworth’s Iconography
JO - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgz137
DA - 2020-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/brandon-c-yen-the-excursion-and-wordsworth-s-iconography-AT4cDLBjpO
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -