Strange Power of Speech

Book excerpt: This book explores the relationship between tropes of literary property and signification in the writings and literary politics of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Eilenberg argues that a complex of ideas about property, propriety, and possession sets the terms for the two writers' mutually revisionary efforts and informs the images of literary authority, textual identity, and poetic figuration evident in their major works. Eilenberg's readings of the collaboration and its principle texts bring to bear a combination of deconstructive, psychoanalytic, and both new and literary historical methods. The book provides 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.