ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to utilise fully the kind of perspective that the twenty first century is increasingly adopting – through the work of editions such as the Cornell Series for William Wordsworth but also more widely in on-line texts which allow multiple versions of a text to be viewed simultaneously. It looks at the nature of Wordsworth's compositional habits in general and at the way The Excursion comes into being in particular. Stephen Parrish argues convincingly for the importance of the dramatic mode in Lyrical Ballads and that Coleridge's refusal to see the importance of this for Wordsworth is a major cause of his dissatisfaction with the other man's principles. The study of multiple manuscripts at different stages of composition, enacts a reading, and creates a readerly perspective which Wordsworth himself could never have envisaged and one which postulates the existence of a scholarly reader.
