Rhetoriken der Aneignung in William Wordsworths Prelude

Abstract

Abstract One of the contributing factors to the Romantic reconceptualization of poetical work and of literary genius is a modernisation of the concept of property in the course of the 18th century. In the texts of English Romanticism in general and of William Wordsworth in particular, this modernisation inaugurates a new rhetoric of property for which two factors are decisive: firstly, the reversibility of possessors and possessed and, secondly, the proclamation of imaginary possessions that might also be designated as „phantom properties“.