Risonanze wordsworthiane in 'Highland River' di Neil Miller Gunn

In his spiritual autobiography The Atom of Delight (1956), the Scottish novelist Neil Miller Gunn explicitly recognised William Wordsworth among his literary fathers. About two decades earlier, he had already shown this indebtedness, albeit latently, in the novel Highland River (1937). The story of the hero’s physical and mental journey up the river of his childhood has many echoes of the «growth of a poet’s mind» in The Prelude, as well as of central motifs and imagery in other poems by the Romantic writer. The aim of the article is to examine those Wordsworthian resonances in the novel which mainly revolve around the themes of time, memory, and childhood, ultimately showing how Gunn connects individual time with historical time, and the protagonist’s growing consciousness with the recovery of cultural memory in epiphanic moments which he names «atoms of delight», his own version of Wordsworth’s «spots of time».