Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay argues that William Wordsworth and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) use the lyrical ballad genre to formalize and conceptualize imaginative revenge, a pleasurable form of retaliation particularly suitable for everyday life that involves punishing one’s foe strictly in the mind without resorting to violence or physical action of any kind. Imaginative revenge takes shape in lyrical ballads through formal elements like lyric and meter, unlike the more conventional formal and thematic features of revenge literature such as plot, spectacular violence, and tragedy. In discussing Wordsworth’s “Andrew Jones” (1800) and Landon’s “Revenge” (1828) as two lyrical ballads that exemplify such revenge, this essay also attends to the shared, communal potential of this otherwise private form of reprisal as well as the ways in which these poets anticipate arguments in more recent moral philosophy and affect theory about the value of negative feeling in the everyday.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
