@article{oai:icu.repo.nii.ac.jp:00002599,
 author = {Simons, Christopher E. J.},
 issue = {45},
 journal = {人文科学研究 （キリスト教と文化）, Humanities: Christianity and Culture},
 month = {Mar},
 note = {William Wordsworth’s first published epic poem, The Excursion (1814),
is an ‘elegiac epic’ concerned with how traces of former human existence
in the local landscape (graves, epitaphs, and tales of life and death) affect
feelings of despair and hope among the living. Eschewing traditional
historicist approaches to the poem, this paper locates a strong intertextual
relationship between arguments made by the poem’s three main characters
and the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century field of
antiquarianism. The characters of the Solitary, the Wanderer, and the
Pastor deploy the materials, methods, and ideologies of antiquarianism to
convey both similar and contrasting positions on moral philosophy,
religion, and historiography. Comparing the antiquarian images, language,
and allusions used by the three characters dispels the sense of an author’s
unified position in the debate. The three characters’ opinions may reflect
Wordsworth’s positions on the uses of antiquarianism in philosophical,
religious, and political debates at different stages of his life, but
antiquarianism remains an ambiguous text in the poem, associated with a
range of philosophical positions and feelings. The paper illuminates a
number of key antiquarian expressions in the poem, and allusions to
antiquarianism in contemporary literary texts. The paper concludes that
each of the three characters’ relationships to antiquarianism in the poem
subverts the others. The Solitary is diagnosed with ‘despondency’, but his
antiquarian characteristics serve as examples of past and present
intellectual and moral strength. The Wanderer represents a position of
antiquarian optimism, but is himself a second-order antiquarian character
in the text, a fiction in which the other two characters may not believe.
Finally, the Pastor appears to support the Wanderer’s optimistic use of
antiquarian materials and methods to ‘cure’ the Solitary, but in fact negates
the Wanderer’s optimistic and fanciful historiography with a pessimistic
and solipsistic reduction of antiquarianism to Christian dogma. An
intertextual approach that considers The Excursion in relation to
antiquarianism demonstrates the multiplicity of historiographic
perspectives in the poem, and Wordsworth’s willingness to allow different
and conflicting stages of his thoughts and feelings free play in the poem’s
dialogues.},
 pages = {159--213},
 title = {Antiquarian landscape and allusion in Wordsworth’s Excursion},
 year = {2014}
}