This thesis uses narratology and film theory to examine the construction
of The Prelude. It contends that the powers of imagination are consciously displayed in the production of coherence and continuity, a production that is continuously offered to the deconstruction of the reader. In analysing early poems and the prefaces I stress Wordsworth's appeal to the co-operative power of the reader and his own analysis of the way the mind processes images to "make a tale." He assumes that a public, "objective" set of "real" images exist which can inspire various tales. In highlighting his own processes of imagination as narrator of The Prelude, Wordsworth suggests and, indeed, exemplifies other ways in which the material may be processed by the revisionary reader. The Prelude has an often-stated goal and each episode has an equally overtly expressed meaning in terms of that goal. These discursive intents, however, are
frequently crossed, complicated or contradicted by equally overt pointers to other possible meanings. Wordsworth the narrator might show himself hesitant, uncertain and conjectural; Wordsworth the poet/director highlights the optional, creative alternatives open to the active reader who is invited to participate in the growth of the poetic mind. I note the discrepancies discovered by textual and biographical criticism but my central concern is the foregrounding of revisionary moments within one version, that of 1805.
The imagery of the Childhood "spots of time" seems to emerge from an everyday context with the eidetic memory of actually occurring events. These are, however, taken "out of time" and syntagmatic continuity and subject to varying perspectives, including the "mature" viewpoint of the narrator, stressing paradigmatic values sometimes at variance with the suggestions of the images themselves. The responses to Cambridge and London are different, the first being experienced from a more intimately involved point of view that yields more personal and imaginative growth than that overtly acknowledged. London, predominantly a "spectacle" soliciting the gaze of an evaluative observer, yields contradictory moments of self-involving re-valuation and the
opposition which the argument sets up between city and country is deconstructed. Giving a subject position to those who viewed the French Revolution in different ways, it is almost impossible to separate the enthusiastic from the sceptical Wordsworth in chronological terms and even in the extent of his scepticism. While Wordsworth might have other reasons for confusing the account, I maintain that this is quite in keeping with a poem that highlights the capacity of imagination to give different views of the same object and the capacity of that object to evoke different responses. The emergence of Coleridge here as a primary addressee and the dialogic presences of Burke and Godwin sutures the reader into a "public sphere" that is at once intimate, public and creative. Affirming the creative powers of the "common" man in response to the
"endless" meanings suggested by the world, Wordsworth concludes by inviting retroactive revision of his own account by a reader he has taught to become a poet like himself.