Eilenberg''s subject is the relationship between tropes of literary property and signification in the writings and literary politics of Wordsworth and Coleridge. She argues that a complex of ideas about property, propriety, and possession informs the images of literary authority, textual identity, and poetic figuration found in the two writers'' major work. During the period of their closest collaboration as well as at points later in their careers, Wordsworth and Coleridge took as their primary material the images of property and propriety upon which definitions of meaning and figuration have traditionally depended, grounding these images in writings about landed and spiritual property, material and intellectual theft, dispossession by banks and possession by demons. The writings and the politics generated by the literalization of such images can be read as allegorical of the structures and processes of signification. Each such gesture addresses in some way the fundamental question - who owns language, or who controls meaning? Eilenberg''s approach brings to bear a combination of deconstructive, psychoanalytic, and both new and literary historical methods to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between two of the major figures of English Romanticism as well as fresh insight into what is at stake in the analogy between the verbal and the material or the literary and the economic.
Industry Reviews
"A work that is stimulating, articulate, and theoretically sophisticated without being precious or needlessly obscure. Strange Power of Speech offers a fresh and challenging approach to the old problem of the whys and wherefores of the collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge."--South Atlantic Review
"Her discussion is laid out across a wide and imaginative range....This is a demanding, conceptually exciting book."--Choice
"Eilenberg writes intelligently and persuasively about Wordsworth's and Coleridge's differing attitudes to language, property, possession, originality, authority....The arguments...are complex, subtle, learned, and powerfully expressed (in language largely free of jargon)."--English Literature
"One of those rare works that is at once brilliantly articulated in detail and powerful in its implications for literary studies....Eilenberg's work will take its place at the head of many recent works on intertextual, dialogic, or collaborative creation....It will stand out not simply as a masterful application of theories previously existing, but as a work which breaks new ground and sets a new agenda."--Paul A. Magnuson, New York University
"Although a great deal has been written about the personal and literary relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, the lexicon and much of the material that Eilenberg brings over to the subjects are found to be irresistibly useful....What makes Strange Power of Speech profitable to read is its easy intelligence and lively style. That it does not pay homage to one critical ideology or another is to its credit. You can actually get a sense of
Wordsworth and Coleridge both as writers and persons in this book....I am enriched to have this book as my property while being possessed by it."--ANQ
"A work that is stimulating, articulate, and theoretically sophisticated without being precious or needlessly obscure. Strange Power of Speech offers a fresh and challenging approach to the old problem of the whys and wherefores of the collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge."--South Atlantic Review
"Her discussion is laid out across a wide and imaginative range....This is a demanding, conceptually exciting book."--Choice
"Eilenberg writes intelligently and persuasively about Wordsworth's and Coleridge's differing attitudes to language, property, possession, originality, authority....The arguments...are complex, subtle, learned, and powerfully expressed (in language largely free of jargon)."--English Literature
"One of those rare works that is at once brilliantly articulated in detail and powerful in its implications for literary studies....Eilenberg's work will take its place at the head of many recent works on intertextual, dialogic, or collaborative creation....It will stand out not simply as a masterful application of theories previously existing, but as a work which breaks new ground and sets a new agenda."--Paul A. Magnuson, New York University
"Although a great deal has been written about the personal and literary relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, the lexicon and much of the material that Eilenberg brings over to the subjects are found to be irresistibly useful....What makes Strange Power of Speech profitable to read is its easy intelligence and lively style. That it does not pay homage to one critical ideology or another is to its credit. You can actually get a sense of
Wordsworth and Coleridge both as writers and persons in this book....I am enriched to have this book as my property while being possessed by it."--ANQ
"Authoritative scholarly study - balanced, readable, knowledgeable, skillfully argued, and soundly documented."--Studies in Romanticism
