ELH

Romantic and postmodern ideology promise a release from the modern condition's material interruptions of the restricted economy of "life" by naturalizing representation. The present paper addresses a performance of this promise in Wordsworth's understanding of "low life" as "real life." I will read "Resolution and Independence" as testing the privatization of justice through pleasurable moral sympathy and death-denial; tracing Matthew Arnold's unstable negotiation between Wordsworth's rhetoric of community and the inscription of difference in the State of modernity; and intermittently articulating the legacy of modernity's unresolved crises in Alan Warner's Morvern Callar.