From Advertisement to Albatross: Unity or Diversity?

Abstract

Any attempts to consider matters of contextual coherence — the ‘unifying’ rationale behind the joint enterprise and the success of Lyrical Ballads in demonstrating this authorial ‘intention’ — are bound to be dogged by difficulties. Indeed, a growing chorus of critics view with suspicion ‘traditional Anglo-American practice, where the quest is for the unity of the work, its coherence’, and interpret this search as a procedure for ‘repairing any deficiencies in consistency by reference to the author’s philosophy or the contemporary world picture’. The effect, maintains Catherine Belsey (1980, p. 109), is to ‘close the text and make criticism the accomplice of ideology’.