Simpson, David
David Simpson has spent his career grappling with the degree to which Romantic writers attempt to make authoritative pronouncements about history, beginning with his first full-length book, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979), up through and including his two books about Wordsworth (Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real [1982]; Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The Poetry Of Displacement [1987]). Simpson's recent work questions the political efficacy of cultural studies, of what he calls in the title of his important book, The Academic Postmodern.