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18.97.14.89
18.97.14.89
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William Wordsworth and "Empirical" Christianity: With a Focus on The Pedlar Narrative in The Excursion
( Yang Sook Shin )
UCI I410-ECN-0102-2014-800-002092890

As an effort to get to a bottom of the difficult question of Wordsworth`s religion, this paper provides a brief discussion of the contemporary religious situation and the role of a philosopher-poet in the British society of the time, plus a close reading of the Pedlar narrative as the first part of The Excursion published in 1814. Taking the Pedlar narrative as Wordsworth`s own religious autobiography, the paper argues that the poet presented a revisionary Christianity, an essentially eclectic kind of Christianity reached by way of combining an entrenched belief in the words of God as they appear in the Bible with a seemingly pantheistic approach to feel the presence of God via nature. The concomitant discovery made in this paper is the fact that this ``pantheistic` approach to God is really an attempt on the part of the poet to feel God through his own sense, and so an ``empirical`` type of attempt; that the revisionary Christianity Wordsworth came to conceive of towards the end of the Pedlar narrative is not totally free from empiricism for its most fundamental desire for sensory experiences relating to God and God``s words even. Such empirical attitude is viewed as something courageous on the part of Wordsworth considering that it is a grave challenge to the orthodox Christian doctrine based on faith and also that the contemporary British revealed almost neurotic sensitivity to any kind of heresy.

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