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Journal articles on the topic 'Victorian Poem'
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1
Levine, Naomi. "VictorianPearl: Tennysonian Elegy and the Return of a Medieval Poem." Victoriographies 6, no. 3 (2016): 238–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/vic.2016.0240.
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In 1904, medievalist critic William Henry Schofield declared that the fourteenth-century poem Pearl was not an elegy, overturning an assumption that had persisted since the poem's first publication in 1864. This article focuses on the question of Pearl's genre and its relation to the Victorian literary culture into which the poem was reborn. I argue that Victorian critics did not read Pearl simply as an elegy, but as a Victorian elegy, a genre with a very particular cluster of thematic and formal attributes – and, indeed, a heightened sensitivity to the fit between theme and form. Although Pearl is five centuries older than In Memoriam, its long latency as a manuscript and its subsequent revival fourteen years into the In Memoriam craze created the impression that the medieval poem followed and was somehow derived from the Victorian one. This article proposes that Victorian models of form and genre were powerful enough to work backward. Pearl's late-century reception demonstrates how thoroughly In Memoriam defined Victorian poetics not only by instigating new prosodic fashions, but also by shaping the reading practices with which Victorians approached their literary historical past.
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Morton, John. "Science in Neo-Victorian Poetry." Victoriographies 6, no. 2 (2016): 131–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/vic.2016.0228.
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This article considers the work of three contemporary poets and their engagement, in verse, with nineteenth-century science. Beginning with the outlandish ‘theories’ of Mick Imlah's ‘The Zoologist's Bath’ (1983), it moves on to two works of biografiction – Anthony Thwaite's poem ‘At Marychurch’ (1980), which outlines Philip Henry Gosse's doomed attempts to unite evolution and Christianity, and Ruth Padel's Darwin: A Life in Poems (2009). Starting off with John Glendening's idea that science in neo-Victorian fiction, if fully embraced, provides an opportunity for self-revelation to characters, this article explores the rather less happy resolutions of each of these poems, while in addition discussing the ways in which the poems perform the formal changes and mutability of nature.
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Dwoskin, Beth. "‘Dos Lid funem Hemd’: A Yiddish Translation of a Classic Victorian Poem." Zutot 12, no. 1 (2015): 79–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18750214-12341273.
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Yiddish proletarian poet Morris Winchevsky translated ‘Song of the Shirt,’ a classic Victorian poem by Thomas Hood. This article examines Winchevsky’s Yiddish translation verse by verse, looking at Winchevsky’s choice of Yiddish words that convey, enhance, or alter Hood’s meaning. The article demonstrates Winchevsky’s facility in language and translation, and his ability to create a distinctly Yiddish version of a classic English poem.
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Heera B, Balu Das P S, and Dr Shibani Chakraverty Aich. "‘A Musical Instrument’ as an Autobiographical Poem of Elizabeth Barrett Browning." GIS Business 15, no. 1 (2020): 142–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.26643/gis.v15i1.17960.
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The poem “A Musical Instrument” written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is being discussed in the paper. The poem is viewed as it contains autobiographical elements. The poet indirectly describes how she fights against the conventional society of Victorian period. She reveals how she disturbed the river of rules with her pen. The poem represents the mythical story of god Pan and the syrinx. She compares herself with the Pan who created music out of reed. She struggled against societal themes just like Pan tore out reeds from the river. She made the best art like Pan made beautiful music from with the instrument. Like Pan modified reed into a musical instrument she reshape the modern thinking and attitudes. She fought for literary freedom in her poetic battle against a society that denied women all freedoms. Victorian society never accepted any art form from women rather they only considered for being a mother. Sufferings of Victorian women can be seen in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Art was hidden from women by the Victorian society like Syrinx was hidden from Pan by the water nymphs.
 The poem portrays the story that Pan once tried to chase the nymph Syrinx. She ran away from him and went near a river then she asked the water nymphs to save her. They turned her into a reed so as to hide her in the river. Pan never found her. So, in a rage, he jumped into the water and walked briskly, thus disturbing the calmness of the river. By the end, he made a musical instrument out of the reed, and its music was haunting and mind-blowing. . Just as Pan did, she worked hard to polish her art to bring the best poetry to the literary world .The poem describes the power and control over women in the society but we are giving a new notion that it contains autobiographical elements.
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Arafat, Faisal. "Robert Browning’s Poem Porphyria’s Lover: Viewed from the Perspective of a Short Story." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 3, no. 1 (2021): 170–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.36892/ijlls.v3i1.521.
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Robert Browning quite as an exception to his contemporary Victorian poets opted for the psychoanalysis of his characters in his poems. His obsession of delving deeper into the psyche of his characters most often lent his poems with the essence and atmosphere of a story, to be more accurate – a short story. Browning’s readers still today hovers in the labyrinth created in his poetic world. He leaves his readers in such a juncture from where the readers time and again look back into the plot of his poems to find answers of the mysteries invested by the poet. Stylistically being much ahead of the contemporary trend of poetry, Browning’s poems could be labeled as futuristic. His artistic faculty in his poems can only be somewhat explained and understood if analyzed from the perspectives of a short story. Only then the crossroads where Browning leaves his readers in his poems can find a destination and provide a literary solution. One of the most extraordinary poems of Robert Browning is ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. This paper is an analysis of the poem from the perspective of the features of a short story. The plot and theme of the poem is quite obscure especially the ending of the poem leaves the readers with a feeling of puzzle and incompleteness. In order to explain this puzzle and incompleteness this study presents an elaborate discussion of the characteristics of short story. Then it discusses the storytelling ability of Browning in his poems and finally based on the findings presents an analysis of the poem to determine the matching characteristics of a short story in the poem. The study is completely based on a qualitative analysis.
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Morlier, Margaret M. "The Death of Pan: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Romantic Ego." Browning Institute Studies 18 (1990): 131–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s009247250000290x.
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During the past two decades Elizabeth Barrett Browning has become most appreciated for her 1856 feminist epic Aurora Leigh, a poem in which she asserted her “highest convictions upon Life and Art.” Before publishing Aurora Leigh, however, she said that one of her most important poems was “The Dead Pan.” When she published her two-volume collection of Poems in 1844, she insisted that “The Dead Pan” be placed last for emphasis. This poem of thirty-nine stanzas, each ending with some variation of the phrase “Pan is dead,” is often overlooked today in discussions of Barrett Browning's development probably because its theme appears outdated to modern readers. Beginning with a catalogue of classical deities—such as Juno, Apollo, and Cybele—shocked by the crucifixion of Christ, the poem depicts the death of these classical gods along with their representative, Pan. In the final third of the poem they are replaced by the Christian god and his martyred son. Then the refrain “Pan is dead” changes in meaning: no longer the lament of the classical gods, the refrain becomes a joyful proclamation of the Christian poet. On a first reading, “The Dead Pan” seems simply to celebrate orthodox Christianity; it is still generally remembered as a Victorian expression of pietism or, in Douglas Bush's facetious words of 1937, a poem in which the “Greek gods are brought face to face with Christian truth and put to rout” (268).
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Farhana, Jannatul. "Revolutionary Poetic Voices of Victorian Period: A Comparative Study between Elizabeth Barrette Browning and Christina Rossetti." English Language and Literature Studies 6, no. 1 (2016): 69. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v6n1p69.
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<p>This article is an attempt to provide a comparative study between Elizabeth Barrette Browning and Christina Rossetti, two famous authors in the Victorian period. As the first female poet Browning throws a challenge by dismantling and mingling the form of epic and novel in her famous creation <em>Aurora Leigh. </em>This epic structurally and thematically offers a new form that questions the contemporary prejudices about women. Being influenced and inspired by Browning, Rossetti shows her mastery on sonnets in <em>Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets</em>. Diversity in the themes of her poem allows Rossetti to demonstrate her intellect and independent thinking, which represents the cultural dilemma of Victorian women. Though Browning is addressed as the ‘first female poet’ and the pioneer of revolutionary female poets, her <em>Aurora Leigh </em>recognizes and celebrates the success of a female poet in that period but at the same time acknowledges the importance of traditional romance as well as marriage union at the end of the poem. On the other hand, in <em>Mona Innominata, </em>Rossetti mingles the traditional idea of romance with High Anglican belief to establish and uphold the position of women in the society as an individual and self sufficient one. She is the first poet in Victorian period who boldly denies the dominance of men in a woman’s life by celebrating sisterhood in her another famous work <em>Goblin Market</em>. Though Browning and Rossetti belong to the same period, Rossetti is quite advanced than Browning in terms of experimenting with forms, themes and breaking the conventions of Victorian era.</p>
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Teodorski, Marko. "After Death, Death: The Mechanics of Longing in Henry Carrington's «The Siren»." Amaltea. Revista de mitocrítica 11 (June 25, 2019): 71–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.5209/amal.62903.
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This essay deals with the mechanics of longing in a late Victorian siren poem by Henry Carrington, The Siren. Although Victorian literature was teeming with short stories, poems and novels on sirens, this genre, that builds upon and reverses Homeric siren tradition, remains neglected in literary discussions. With the translation of The Little Mermaid into English in 1872, the image of a "longing siren" was born. No longer were these the stories of Odysseus who had survived the siren song: now they were about the sirens’ own sorrows, griefs and desires. Sirens became profoundly human – they became desiring subjects themselves.
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Sokolova, Natalia I. "The ancient poet and philosopher in M. Arnold’s dramatic poem “Empedocles on Etna”." Science and School, no. 4, 2020 (2020): 18–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.31862/1819-463x-2020-4-18-25.
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„Empedocles on Etna”, called by Arnold „dramatic poem”, was not meant to be staged. In a work with three actors (Empedocles, his pupil Pausanias and the poet Callicles) there is almost no action, the predominant role is given to the monologues of the famous philosopher. The article analyzes the image of the main character of the poem. The state of the man of transition era in Ancient Greece, suffering from disappointments, doubts, loneliness, Arnold considered consonant with modernity. Lonely, disillusioned in the world Empedocles is contrasted in the poem with Callicles, who joyfully accepts life. Episodes of Ancient Greece mythology are interwoven into the text of the poem, contributing to the understanding of the image of Empedocles, the nature of the relationship between the characters. Empedocles’ monologues touch upon the problems relevant to the Victorian era, connected with the new attitude to the universe, to nature, to the problems of faith. Empedocles with his “congestion of the brain” is close to the author (according to Arnold himself). Thus, without deviating from the facts of the biography of the ancient poet and philosopher, Arnold, in essence, creates a portrait of his contemporary.
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Wahyudiputra, Alexei. "DEATH AS THE “REAL”: A PSYCHOANALYTIC READING OF MATTHEW ARNOLD’S YOUTH AND CALM." Poetika 9, no. 1 (2021): 43. http://dx.doi.org/10.22146/poetika.v9i1.63325.
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Matthew Arnold was one of the poets who paid special attention to youth and the dynamics of youth culture in the Victorian era. Living in an era that stimulated modern times, Arnold produced writings that can be classified as historical records, although not factual, of society's reactions to the fundamental social and cultural changes of the time. The literary arena was particularly affected, as the Victorian era marked the beginning for poets and artists alike to shed the romantic spirit that they had breathed into their works and adapt to the technological and industrial realities around them. This article explores Matthew Arnold's poem entitled “Youth and Calm”. The poem explores a stream of consciousness that contemplates “the youth" and their dreams. This study aims to uncover the meaning of the poem based on its textual composition without correlating it with Arnold's other works. Using theoretical phenomenology tools to dissect language phenomena and the Freudo-Lacanian method in interpreting the theme, this study led to the revelation that the poem talks of “death” as a symbolically repressed object. Matthew Arnold merupakan salah satu penulis puisi yang menaruh atensi lebih pada pemuda dan juga dinamika kebudayaan muda-mudi pada era Victoria. Hidup di dalam yang era mendasari kultur modern, Arnold menghasilkan karya-karya yang dapat diklasifikasikan sebagai catatan historis, meskipun tidak faktual secara absolut, terkait reaksi masyarakat dalam menghadapi perubahan sosial dan kultural yang begitu mendasar di kala itu. Terlebih dalam arena literatur, kehadiran era Victorian merupakan awal penanda bagi penyair dan produser seni lainnya untuk mulai menanggalkan jiwa romantisme yang mereka hembuskan pada tiap karya dan beralih pada realita teknologi dan industri di sekitar mereka. Dalam artikel ini, puisi Matthew Arnold yang ditelaah secara mendalam berjudul “Youth and Calm”. Puisi tersebut mengeksplorasi arus pemikiran yang berisikan kontemplasi terhadap figur “pemuda” dan apa yang mereka impikan. Penulisan ini bertujuan untuk menggali makna puisi berdasarkan komposisi tekstualnya dan tanpa menghubungkannya dengan karya Arnold lainnya. Menggunakan paradigma fenomenologi untuk membedah struktur kebahasaan serta Freudo-Lacanian dalam menginterpretasi tema menghasilkan sebuah makna bahwa “Death” atau kematian merupakan objek yang secara simbolis dipendam oleh subjek youth yang dibahas pada puisi ini.
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Prins, Yopie. "“What Is Historical Poetics?”." Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 1 (2016): 13–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00267929-3331577.
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AbstractIn posing questions about what is “historical” and what counts as “poetics,” historical poetics cannot separate the practice of reading a poem from the histories and theories of reading that mediate our ideas about poetry. While nineteenth-century verse cultures revolved around reading by generic recognition, a reading of poetry as a form of cognition emerges among later critics like I. A. Richards, who illustrates how a line from Robert Browning is read in the mind’s eye, as if in the present tense. But Browning was already doing a version of historical poetics, in writing “Pan and Luna” as a poem about reading other poems about Pan, among them “A Musical Instrument,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the composition and reception of her poem, we see how Victorian poetry foregrounds its multiple mediations, including the mediation of voice by meter as a musical instrument. The recirculation of her popular poem through citation and recitation, illustration and anthologization, prosody and parody, demonstrates a varied history of thinking through—simultaneously “about” and “in”—verse.
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Lecourt, Sebastian. "Idylls of the Buddh': Buddhist Modernism and Victorian Poetics in Colonial Ceylon." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 131, no. 3 (2016): 668–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2016.131.3.668.
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This essay explores how Edwin Arnold's epic poem The Light of Asia (1879) popularized a formal analogy between Buddhism and Christianity. The poem was based on a series of missionary texts that had reshaped the Buddha's career into a close approximation of Jesus's in order to frame Buddhism as a fit object of Protestant conversion. Early anglophone readers in Sri Lanka, however, took it as evidence of Buddhism's equal stature and thus helped make The Light of Asia an international best seller and a touchstone for popular Buddhist nationalisms in the twentieth century. In this way Arnold's poem allows us to develop a more complex sense both of how literary forms globalize—how a literary construct can take on global purchase precisely because readers disagree over its meaning—and of the powerful role that specific literary media play in influencing these different interpretations.
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David, Deirdre. "“Art's a Service”: Social Wound, Sexual Politics, and Aurora Leigh." Browning Institute Studies 13 (1985): 113–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0092472500005393.
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh has become a key text for feminist critics concerned with nineteenth-century women writers. For some, Aurora Leigh is a revolutionary poem, a passionate indictment of patriarchy that speaks the resentment of the Victorian woman poet through a language of eroticized female imagery. For others, the poem is less explosive, and Barrett Browning's liberal feminism is seen as compromised by Aurora Leigh's eventual dedication to a life governed by traditionally male directives. In my view, however, Aurora Leigh is neither revolutionary nor compromised: rather, it is a coherent expression of Barrett Browning's conservative sexual politics, and I shall argue that female imagery is employed to show that the “art” of the woman poet performs a “service” for a patriarchal vision of the apocalypse. In Aurora Leigh woman's art is made the servitor of male ideal.
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Moulavi Nafchi, Asghar, Mitra Mirzayee, and Morteza Sobhani Zadeh. "Robert Browning: A Dramatic Monologue Marvel." International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences 63 (November 2015): 225–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.18052/www.scipress.com/ilshs.63.225.
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One of the most effective literary devices within different didactic and aesthetic forms is the dramatic monologue. The dramatic monologue distinguishes the speaker’s character from that of the poet’s. The double meaning that lies at the heart of the dramatic monologue, conveys the speaker’s version or variety of meaning and intentions. The Dramatic monologue has been practiced for a very long time, but it was Robert browning who invested it with a deeper level of meaning giving it frequency in an attempt to support preexisting aesthetic values in favor of a poem that valued form over content. Although such a dialogue is called dramatic, it is not a theatrical device, proper. The speaker of the poem delivers such comments on the slice of life at disposal that would leave us with a deep emotional experience. By listening to the words pouring out of the speaker’s mind, the reader/listener obtains a psychoanalytic view of the speaker. The current article aims to study Robert browning, the prominent Victorian poet, by putting on the pedestal his essential role in investing the dramatic monologue in English literature with an essential poetic significance and role by reviewing a number of his major poems.
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Barton, Anna Jane. "NURSERY POETICS: AN EXAMINATION OF LYRIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE CHILD IN TENNYSON'S “THE PRINCESS”." Victorian Literature and Culture 35, no. 2 (2007): 489–500. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150307051595.
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“THE PRINCESS,”TENNYSON's narrative poem about a radically feminist princess and a cross-dressing prince, framed by an imagined argument between Victorian men and women concerning the role of women in modern society, has, understandably, formed the central text in a number of articles about nineteenth-century gender poetics. Critics have been eager to engage with the fictional authors of the narrative, casting Tennyson as, on the one hand, a bastion of Victorian patriarchy, and on the other a subversive feminist. Donald E. Hall, in an essay, published in his collectionFixing Patriarchy, is the most persuasive advocate for a masculinist Tennyson, presenting “The Princess” as undertaking a project of “subsumption,” in which the words and demands of the women are “ingested, modified and incorporated by the patriarch” (46). In an article entitled: “Marginalized Musical Interludes: Tennyson's Critiques of Conventionality in ‘The Princess,’“ Alisa Clapp-Itnyre provides a representative case for the defence, presenting the lyrics as “pivotal feminist commentaries” that work to interrupt and deconstruct the male narrative (229). Herbert Tucker locates a third way, identifying the poem as a “textbook Victorian compromise” (Tennyson352). He argues that it “avoids taking a position on a hotly debated issue by taking up any number of positions” and characterizes this compromise, not as a commitment to portraying a complex contemporary issue with integrity, but as the result of Tennyson's not caring particularly either way: “neither the rallying of Victorian feminism” he writes, “nor the patriarchal status quo was sufficient stimulus to commitment” (352). In order to open up a new line of enquiry into “The Princess” I would like to look beyond the gender questions that continue to be batted back and forth amongst Tennyson's critics and to offer the figure of the child as an alternative and more powerful cultural, aesthetic and professional stimulus to Tennyson's poem.
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Miller, Ashley. "CHRISTINA ROSSETTI'S RADICAL OBJECTIVITY." Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no. 1 (2018): 143–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150317000365.
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For decades now, ChristinaRossetti's poetry has proven to be a rich vantage point from which to explore the complexity of Victorian attitudes toward the material world. This is certainly true of her most famous poem, “Goblin Market.” Deliciously steeped in the sensual experiences it simultaneously condemns, “Goblin Market” is a poem invested – ambiguously, for most critics – in the relationship between humans and material things: the things they buy, look at, feel, taste. This is a relationship we tend to consider in terms of commodity culture and economic exchange. And such a reading makes sense: Rossetti's poem, a tale of two sisters whose domesticity is disrupted by the tramp of mysterious goblin men selling fruit from unknown climes, grapples in many ways with these exact terms. Laura (who barters a lock of hair for the goblin fruit and then begins to waste away from an insatiable appetite) and Lizzie (who saves her sister by bringing home an antidote in the form of fruit juice, which she herself has refused to consume) seem to embody the potential dangers faced by the female consumer. Indeed, so much has been written about the relationship between women and consumer culture in “Goblin Market” that it nearly qualifies as its own subfield in Victorian studies.
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Beyer, Charlotte. "True Crime." American, British and Canadian Studies Journal 28, no. 1 (2017): 131–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/abcsj-2017-0009.
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Abstract This poem is a creative response to contemporary true crime narratives about baby farming in Victorian times, namely Alison Rattle and Allison Vale’s The Woman Who Murdered Babies for Money: The Story of Amelia Dyer (London: André Deutsch, 2011); and the TV documentary, “Amelia Dyer: Martina Cole’s Lady Killers.”
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Tucker, Herbert F. "Rossetti's Goblin Marketing: Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye." Representations 82, no. 1 (2003): 117–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rep.2003.82.1.117.
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Recent criticism putting the market back in Christina Rossetti's ''Goblin Market'' (1862) makes, and leaves, space for consideration of the poem's relation to marketing-as-advertising. Written to be read by adults in silence as if out loud to children, the poem trades in the mystique of a virtual orality that is structurally analogous to its goblin merchants' mystification, through promotional language, of both the nature of their retail business and the origins of the produce they sell. The virtual-oral mode of the poem creates rich opportunities for local wordplay to highlight that mystification at a juncture in economic history when with new subtlety and aggressiveness a burgeoning advertising business was transforming Victorian consumerism. The miracle of a sister's redemption from goblin taste stakes on Rossetti's Christian belief her congruent faith as a poet: that a modern tongue may be redeemed by art, in spite of art's collusion with the forces by which it must circulate to earn a hearing.
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Groth, Helen. "TECHNOLOGICAL MEDIATIONS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: ROGER FENTON’S CRIMEA EXHIBITION AND “THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE”." Victorian Literature and Culture 30, no. 2 (2002): 553–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150302302092h.
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AT THE GALLERY OF THE SOCIETY OF PAINTERS in Water Colours in Pall Mall East in the autumn of 1855, Roger Fenton exhibited three hundred and twelve photographs taken in the Crimea. Undertaken with the patronage of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the Duke of Newcastle, the then Secretary of State for War, Fenton’s photographic record was intended to inform the Victorian public of the “true” condition of the soldiers in what was fast becoming an unpopular war. In the catalogue, one photograph bore the title “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” a title with both biblical and literary resonances for exhibition audiences in late 1855.1 Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” had been published in the Examiner on 9 December 1854, causing a sensation both at home and in the Crimea.2 Organized around variations on the refrain “Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred,” the poem assumed anthem-like status during the period when Fenton was in the Crimea. Filtered through the lens of Tennyson’s poem, Fenton’s photograph appears to record the traces of a charge or a battle scene that has just taken place.
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Ayvazyan, Lilith. "“BURNT TO THE BONE” WITH LOVE, DAMNATION AND SIN: PHÆDRA AS THE SWINBURNIAN $FEMME$ $\textit{DAMNÉE}$." Armenian Folia Anglistika 17, no. 1(23) (2021): 124–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.46991/afa/2021.17.1.124.
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After nearly two centuries of neglect, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) revived the tragedy of Phædra in his Poems and Ballads of 1866. Phædra, alongside with his other female characters, has been “branded” as shameless, indecent, masochistic, and obsessive. These analyses tend to present the poet’s protagonists as one-dimensional characters lacking emotional and psychological depth. To fully comprehend Swinburne’s Phædra, this paper observes the short poem not only from the point of Pre-Raphaelitism, but also in associations with Sappho and Baudelaire; Sappho acts as Swinburne’s inspiration for female empowerment, while Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal serves as the origin of the unique archetype of femme damnée, that can often be observed in Swinburne’s poetry of the 1860s.
 The aim of this paper is to shed a new light on the character of Phædra by comparing Swinburne’s delineation of Phædra with how she is portrayed in the classical originals, and then examine how he adapted her in the society of nineteenth-century England. Like his Pre-Raphaelite friends and many of the Victorian poets and artists, Swinburne’s work, especially early poems and plays, display the author’s revolt and aversion towards the Victorian “false” morality.
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Christoff, Alicia Mireles. "Margaret and the Victorians." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 134, no. 3 (2019): 507–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.3.507.
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This essay examines Kenneth Lonergan's stunning and underviewed New York City film Margaret (2011), placing it in a larger corpus of post-9/11 artistic production while also drawing out its Victorian intertexts—most notably, the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that gives the film its title. Margaret derives its organizing thematics and formal experiments with sound from the Victorian cultural trope of hyperesthesia: the drive to look beyond the self (the protagonist, the nation) and the answering anxiety that doing so would mean being overwhelmed by the frequency of human suffering. Margaret demonstrates the continued pull of Victorian aesthetics and politics of representation on contemporary literature and film and, I argue, the cost of this persistence. At once emphasizing and occluding the far-reaching and long-lasting violence of formal and informal empire, Margaret carefully attunes us to particular forms of suffering—but only by disattuning us to global catastrophe.
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Norcia, Megan A. "PERFORMING VICTORIAN WOMANHOOD: ELSIE FOGERTY STAGES TENNYSON'S PRINCESS IN GIRLS' SCHOOLS." Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 1 (2013): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150312000198.
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Tennyson's poem The Princess (1847) has long intrigued readers with its polarizing gender politics and playful, lilting verses recounting the grim bloodshed that results when an ambitious Princess establishes a women's college. The frame narrative focuses on a group of friends at a summer party who are inspired by a tale of an ancient warrior queen, who “sallying thro’ the gate, / Had beat her foes with slaughter from her walls” (Prologue 30–34). At some moments jocular and at others acerbic, the men spin the Princess's story, with the women of the gathering providing interludes of music between the tales. In the narrative that unfolds, the Princess establishes a separatist women's college deep in the country, but counter to her plans, a neighboring prince has determined to make her his wife. Along with two friends, the Prince sneaks into the school disguised as a woman. Comedy and romance ensue, leading to the Prince's eventual unmasking and a deadly serious battle between his father and the Princess's father over how her body will be disposed in marriage. The Prince is wounded in the battle and the Princess is smitten with remorse. While nursing him back to health she is “ultimately transformed from a fierce feminist into a broken nurse” (Buchanan 573) as she anticipates the possibilities of agency through marriage and motherhood. The poem ends with the disbanding of the Princess's school and the reinstallation of its female leaders under patriarchal control.
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Winarti, Winarti. "EKSISTENSI PEREMPUAN DALAM PUISI 'BRIDE SONG' KARYA CHRISTINA ROSSETTI." LEKSEMA: Jurnal Bahasa dan Sastra 3, no. 2 (2018): 149. http://dx.doi.org/10.22515/ljbs.v3i2.1144.
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This article aims at describing women existence as reflected on Bride Song poem written by Christina Rossseti. Rossetti’s view on women’s lives was inspired much by her awareness toward the their conditions in Victorian’s era. In the meantime, women were shaped to be an individuals who fulfill the ideal standard as preferred by men. By Bride Song, Rosetti tried to break patriarchal domination toward women. She wanted to turn back the existence equivalence between men and women based on human rights. She also attemped to open the world’s perspective to accept women’s existence as important as men’s and not just a binary opposition of it. Women’s existence in Bride Song is not only a struggle against men’s domination in Victorian era, but it also has relevance with contemporary issues on women’s struggle to show their existence in this modern era.
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Babamiri, Navid Salehi. "The Struggle for Confiscation: An Imperialistic Look at Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Poem “Ulysses”." English Language and Literature Studies 7, no. 1 (2017): 9. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v7n1p9.
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The power of imperialism ascended during the Victorian age, when both the sense of nationalism and industrial revolution concurrently took place. Imperialism in its kind is the sense of domination of one group of people over another, or to a great point, it’s the domination of one country to other countries to confiscate its properties and belongings. Here in the poem written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet tries to ironize the situation by showing and focusing on such an old king (may be the king of England), who has recently come back home from his travels and has complained about his “idleness.” This “idleness” for the king is equal to ceasing the kind of power, namely, if he does not move and battle, he has nothing for his country, and even he does not record a name for himself in the history of England. Thus the aim of the present paper is not only limitedto the relation between power and the sense of imperialism, a relation that leads to malicious and destructive behavior but it also condemns that kind of relation. However, it is done implicitly, as once the poet did in his poem, by showing the negative use of power in hands of some, like the king of England, who has done his best even at his death’s door to continue again and conquer wherever he sees that brings benefits to him. Not surprisingly; the poem also implies to the battle of Troy in the sense of imperial actions.
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Gashi, Syzana Kurtaj. "Browning’s and Serembe’s Love Poems." SEEU Review 15, no. 2 (2020): 31–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/seeur-2020-0015.
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Abstract Browning’s and Serembe’s love poems will be analyzed in this research paper in order to illustrate how they reflected their efforts to present the idea of love in their poetry. In the ‘By the Fire-Side’, one of the major poems of Robert Browning during the thesaurus of the British Victorian period and Zef Serembe’s ‘Song for Longing’, considered by many to rank among the best love poems of Rilindja (Renaissance) poets in the nineteenth century Albania. The two poets, do not consider the idea of love in the abstract term. They include love by referring to the specific details, Browning, to his love relationship with a famous poetess Elizabeth Barrett, their elopement and union in Italy, and Serembe to his love for a girl from his native village, who immigrated to Brazil and subsequently died. In these poems, both poets explore the intimate atmosphere they tried to establish for their beloved women, by describing the places that witnessed the birth and growth of their love. ‘By the Fire-Side’ and ‘Song for Longing’ comprise a common element; they are personal love poems that describe their ideal love, personal feelings, and passion of their love. While Robert Browning in his poem writes about a peaceful and satisfied married life, full of sweet memories and images of his wife, Zef Serembe’s poem is a picture of his sentiment, primarily of solitude and disillusionment. The comparative and descriptive research methods have been helpful while conducting this research paper.
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Gibson, Mary Ellis. "The Criminal Body in Victorian Britain: The Case of The Ring and the Book." Browning Institute Studies 18 (1990): 73–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s009247250000287x.
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“For the choice of subject we have nothing but condemnation. It is Mr Browning's luck” (Litzinger 331). Thus the reviewer for Chamber's Journal in 1869 summed up his reaction to the subject matter of Browning's The Ring and the Book. Indeed, this account of Browning's subject has seemed satisfactory to all but the biographically inclined of Browning's critics. Browning's subject—a grisly murder and its attendant trials—can easily enough be explained by reference to his account of discovering his historical sources in Book 1 of The Ring and the Book or by a general discussion of Browning's personal propensity for the criminal or the bizarre. I wish to argue here, however, that Browning's subject was not merely his “luck.” Rather it went to the heart of social concerns and fictional practices in England in the 1860s. I propose, not to offer an exhaustive new reading of the poem, but to show how we can see The Ring and the Book as embedded in Victorian responses to the criminal body. A focus on the body and crime can provide us with a significant new understanding of Browning's poem even as it offers us a new way to view that poem's connections to Victorian culture and to our own.
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Robson, Catherine. "Standing on the Burning Deck: Poetry, Performance, History." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 120, no. 1 (2005): 148–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/003081205x36912.
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This paper considers the significance of the memorized poem in Victorian schools across the English social spectrum. I use Felicia Hemans's culturally ubiquitous “Casabianca” as a lens to examine the processes by which compulsory recitation forged short-term and long-term bodily relations between individuals and measured language. I argue that the denigration of regular poetic form prominent in the twentieth century's rejection of works like Hemans's poem is an inevitable, if disavowed, response to their institutional histories in the lowest-status echelons of the educational system. The fragmented survival of “Casabianca” in English popular consciousness today is the last remaining trace of its pedagogical past, of a time when the iamb connected to the heartbeat in a manner that we no longer appreciate and cannot feel.
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Stauffer, Andrew M. "“THE KING IS COLD,” BY STODDARD, NOT BROWNING." Victorian Literature and Culture 36, no. 2 (2008): 361–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150308080224.
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About a decade ago, I discovered an unknown poem attributed to Robert Browning in two New York abolitionist periodicals, and published an article about it here in Victorian Literature and Culture. I made the case that the poem, a dramatic monologue entitled “The King is Cold,” sounds like Browning in ways that suggest either its authenticity or the early familiarity of an American audience with Browning's style; and I closed the article with the statement, “By bringing ‘The King is Cold’ to light, I hope to encourage further speculation and inquiry as to its place either among Browning's collected works, or within the larger field of Browning scholarship that includes the study of his American reputation” (469). Since then, electronic databases have automated broad, sweeping searches of periodicals, and now the relevant information is easily discovered: the poem was in fact written by Richard Henry Stoddard, the American poet and man of letters. It was first published under Browning's name in the New York News sometime late in 1857, and was correctly ascribed to Stoddard in Russell's Magazine in December of that year; I found this information by searching in the American Periodicals Series Online, 1740–1900. The abolitionist reprintings (in the National Anti-Slavery Standard and the Liberator) apparently followed the version in the New York News, and the misattribution was perpetuated. Indeed, the poem reappeared in another New York periodical, Munsey's Scrap Book, in 1909, where it was still being given out as Robert Browning's. “The King is Cold” was also included as Browning's in William Cullen Bryant's oft-reprinted New Library of Poetry and Song.
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Menke, Richard. "CULTURAL CAPITAL AND THE SCENE OF RIOTING: MALE WORKING-CLASS AUTHORSHIP IN ALTON LOCKE." Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 1 (2000): 87–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150300281060.
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IN ITS VERY TITLE, Charles Kingsley’s 1850 novel Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography hints at a set of questions that the novel itself never manages to answer in a very clear or convincing way: what is the relationship between manual and intellectual labor, between industrial and poetic production, between making a coat and writing a poem? How might the early Victorian imagination conceive of a working tailor who is also a working poet — especially in light of the various actual working-class poets who appeared on the literary scene in the first half of the nineteenth-century, complete with occupational epithets, such as Thomas Cooper, the “shoe-maker poet” (a figure who in many ways provided a model for Kingsley’s fictional protagonist)? And what if, like a fair number of urban artisans, including Cooper himself, the tailor-poet is also a Chartist — as Alton Locke indeed turns out to be? What is the relationship between the Chartist call for reform and for representation of disenfranchised men in the political realm, and the attempts of a fictional working-class man (since the novel’s treatment of gender, as I will argue, is crucial to its treatment of politics and culture) to enter the early Victorian field of literary production? Or why, in the first place, should a novel that treats the “social problem” of class in the hungry forties and the appalling working conditions of the clothes trade do so by way of the literary aspirations of its title character, that is, through a fictional construction of working-class authorship?
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Slinn, E. Warwick. "BROWNING’S BISHOP CONCEIVES A TOMB: CULTURAL ORDERING AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE." Victorian Literature and Culture 27, no. 1 (1999): 251–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150399271148.
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ON FEBRUARY 18, 1845, Robert Browning sent a poem entitled “The Tomb at Saint Praxed’s” to the acting editor of Hood’s Magazine. He writes: “I pick it out as being a pet of mine, and just the thing for the time — what with the Oxford business, and Camden society and other embroilments” (DeVane and Knickerbocker 35–36). Because of this letter, the immediate historical context for the poem has commonly been taken as the Oxford (Tractarian) movement and Newman’s retraction in 1843. The Cambridge Camden Society (not the London antiquarian society of the same name, which is sometimes thought to be Browning’s reference) was also associated with Romanism, being accused of popery in 1844 and subsequently dissolved by the Cambridge authorities in February 1845, the same month Browning submitted his poem. (It continued as the Ecclesiological Society.) Through its journal, The Ecclesiologist (1841–), the Cambridge Camden Society aimed to study ecclesiastical architecture, following Pugin’s Contrasts (2nd edition, 1841) in complaining about the moral corruption of church architecture and promoting an ethical-spiritual basis for reform.1 Journal items focussed on a range of issues from the symbolic function of church layout to the details of epitaphs and tombs, generally mixing visual values with ecclesiology. Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (139–44) and John Morley in Death, Heaven, and the Victorians (52–62) detail these issues. Browning’s “other embroilments” may well refer therefore to the growing controversy in the 1840s about sepulture and sepulchral style, about the appropriateness or otherwise of ornate tombs and canopies. Hence this poem about a deathbed scene and a Bishop’s tomb may be clearly located within the broadly enveloping mid- Victorian network of cultural practices related to death: distinctively encoded rituals of mourning, debate about gravestones and epitaphs, depictions of deathbed scenes (in painting as well as literature), and widespread discussion of what came to be known as the four last things — death, judgement, heaven, and hell.
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Moore, Natasha. "THE REALISM OF THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE: COVENTRY PATMORE’S POEM RECONSIDERED." Victorian Literature and Culture 43, no. 1 (2015): 41–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150314000333.
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“The Angel in the House is not a very good poem,” writes Carol Christ, “yet it is culturally significant, not only for its definition of the sexual ideal, but also for the clarity with which it represents the male concerns that motivate fascination with that ideal” (147). Her pronouncement is strongly emblematic of recent approaches to Coventry Patmore's best-known poem. The Angel, it is asserted or implied, almost never receives a full or attentive reading now, and does not reward one; it would long since have sunk into obscurity were it not for the unforeseen appropriation of its title as a repository for the prevailing Victorian conception of womanhood; as a text it belongs more properly to the domain of cultural history or gender studies than literary criticism. A renewed scholarly interest in the technical experimentation of Patmore's later volume The Unknown Eros (1877) has done little to challenge this view, largely defining itself against the dull conventionality of the earlier work.
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Plourde, Aubrey. "The Innocent Old Way: Reserved Interpretation and Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market”." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 134, no. 5 (2019): 1076–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.5.1076.
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Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market” has long been recognized as an interpretive enigma. Simultaneously conducting its own surface reading and inviting us to interrogate its buried meanings, the poem adapts the Tractarian doctrine of reserve to set up a hermeneutic paradox rooted in Victorian exegetical thought. Variously a standard for reticent poetic style, an apologia for divine mystery, and a prescription for limiting complex theological knowledge, reserve also served Victorian thinkers as a hermeneutic strategy. Rossetti plays reserve against itself by dramatizing its dueling imperatives—inciting and containing curiosity. Laura's epilogue forecloses interpretation for “illiterate” spiritual children—those who might misconstrue mysterious meanings; simultaneously, the epilogue mobilizes a competing dimension of reserve, juxtaposing its interpretive gatekeeping against its hermeneutic potential. Anticipating recent reading debates, Rossetti's reserve generates a temporally recursive hermeneutic, within which competing interpretations and interpretive modes can be imagined to coexist.
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Puri, Tara. "FABRICATING INTIMACY: READING THE DRESSING ROOM IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE." Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 3 (2013): 503–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150313000077.
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The Victorian novel is dominated by heroines, its narrative driven by their impulses and their irrepressible physicality. These women possess a strong visual presence that is intrinsically bound with the way in which they choose to dress themselves, with authorial attention consistently focusing on the elements of their clothing. The body was a highly visible, and more significantly, a readable cultural symbol in the Victorian period, with its signifying ability vitally linked to the clothes that adorned it. Clothes have often been employed in literary metaphors – words as the clothing of thought, clothes as a masking of the real, and so on. In his long poem In Memoriam, A.H.H., Tennyson succinctly deploys the quiet grief contained in the idea of widow's weeds, bringing together the expressivity of both clothes and words, when he writes: “In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, / Like coarsest clothes against the cold” (stanza 5, ll. 9–10). But in the realist Victorian novel, clothes become even more pertinent, offering a useful descriptive device that is pivotal to the creation of a believable, legible character. The awareness of clothing as something that has potential for both restriction of identity as well as expression of it permeates much of Victorian writing, with numerous novels rendering visible the construction of a coherent selfhood through clothing.
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Karlsen, Ole. "Marion Thain: The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism. Forms of Modernity. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture." Nordisk poesi 3, no. 01 (2018): 79–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.18261/issn.2464-4137-2018-01-06.
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O'Brien, Ellen L. ""Every Man Who Is Hanged Leaves a Poem": Criminal Poets in Victorian Street Ballads." Victorian Poetry 39, no. 2 (2001): 319–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/vp.2001.0015.
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Davis, Aimee. "Adapting Elaine: Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and Feminist Young Adult Novels." ALAN Review 44, no. 3 (2017): 36–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.21061/alan.v44i3.a.4.
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One of the hallmarks of young adult literature is its focus on adolescent protagonists who struggle to reconcile what they want with what they are supposed to want. Indeed, some of the most enduring works of young adult literature, from L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (2006) to Judy Blume’s Forever (1975), place their young characters at a crossroads between cultural convention and individual desire. Foundational scholarship in the field of young adult fiction has suggested a recurring conflict in novels for young readers in which a protagonist finds himself or herself directly at odds with social expectations (McCallum, 1999; Trites, 2004). Furthermore, critics such as Trites (1997), Wilkie-Stibbs (2003), and Mallan (2009) have noted that many of these works concern an adolescent search for identity that is complicated by issues of gender politics, in which a protagonist’s grappling with conventional notions of masculinity and/or femininity is fundamental to a completed coming of age. In Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Literature, Roberta Seelinger Trites (1997) argues that this kind of novel “demonstrate[s] characters ‘turning inward’ in ‘a search for identity’ because some form of environmental pressure has made them aware that they are not upholding socially sanctioned gender roles” (p. 2). In turn, these novels can become cathartic for adolescent readers, who may be facing similar struggles in the throes of real-life adolescence. Relying on the definition of a feminist novel established by Elaine Showalter (1977), Trites (1997) defines a “feminist children’s novel” as one “in which the main character is empowered regardless of gender,” or a novel in which “the child’s sex does not provide a permanent obstacle to her/his development. Although s/he will likely experience some gender-related conflicts, s/he ultimately triumphs over them” (p. 4). Though many novels fit this description, two bestselling young adult novels distinguish their adolescent female protagonists’ search for identity as inspired by the legends of Arthurian literature. Meg Cabot’s Avalon High (2006) and Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003) each reference the Arthurian legend of the Lady of Shalott—specifically the version that was retold and adapted by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his 1842 poem “The Lady of Shalott.” Both novels use the characters, language, and symbolism from Tennyson’s poem to provide their heroines—and by extension, their adolescent readers—with a template through which they can understand, examine, and potentially reject the social codes that attempt to determine their behavior. In capitalizing on the ways in which Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” enhanced and adapted the traditional Arthurian legend for a Victorian audience, Cabot and Bray access what Ann Howey (2007) calls the “constellation of association and meanings” (pp. 89–92) connected to the Lady of Shalott in the medieval and Victorian texts, many of which are distinctly feminist by Trites’s definition. In this article, I will argue that in drawing inspiration specifically from Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” Cabot’s and Bray’s novels develop their feminism through the framework of a Victorian narrative that is more thematically complex and more politically charged than any earlier, medieval version of the Lady of Shalott legend. Specifically, Cabot’s and Bray’s novels reflect the impact of feminist criticism of Tennyson’s poem found in the works of Victorian scholars Nina Auerbach (e.g., The Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, 1982) and the team of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (e.g., Madwoman in the Attic, 1984). This foundational work identifies in Tennyson’s adaptation of the Lady of Shalott a dualistic and subversive set of alternatives that is not present in the medieval sources: her status as both a docile, passive figure who is “powerless in the face of the male” (Gilbert & Gubar, 1984, p. 618) and, simultaneously, as an icon of deviant and potentially powerful feminine desire. To identify the ways in which Cabot’s and Bray’s novels revise the Lady of Shalott narrative and embrace this subversion of traditional gender roles, I will first examine the Lady of Shalott narrative in medieval Arthurian literature and in Tennyson’s poem, focusing on how Tennyson’s enhancements to the tale transformed the Lady of Shalott into an iconic image of Victorian femininity. I will then demonstrate how Cabot and Bray employ revisionist strategies to adapt the gender politics of Tennyson’s poem for a 21st-century young adult readership, creating heroines who reject the passive qualities of the Lady of Shalott in favor of a more autonomous alternative and who, in doing so, model for adolescent readers a search for identity that results in self-identification and empowerment.
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Kidd, Monica. "“If We Can Make a Cure of Him”: Lyrical Grenfell in the St. Anthony Casebooks, 1906." Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 38, no. 2 (2021): 423–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cbmh.520-032021.
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Narrative-based physician records contain much more than observerless data and diagnoses. Indeed, a “case,” the basic currency of medical communication, can be seen as a literary genre, much like a novel or a poem, and given close readings for author voice, tradition, and influences. In this article, I describe my initial encounter with Dr. Wilfred Grenfell’s casebooks in a hospital basement in St. Anthony, Newfoundland and Labrador, and my subsequent engagement with them as both a physician and a poet. Adopting Bleakley and Marshall’s definition of medical lyricism as the impulse that “draws our attention to delicacy, tenderness and the joyous, and to verve, desire, eroticism, the fecund, abundance and generation,” I argue that Grenfell’s approach to medicine in early 20th-century Newfoundland and Labrador was both a product of his scientific training and his enculturation at the end of the Victorian period.
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Burney, Fatima. "Strategies of Sound and Stringing in Ebenezer Pocock's West–East Verse." Comparative Critical Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 319–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2020.0365.
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In an effort to capture how Orientalist translations, imitations and criticism of Asian poetry came to inform the idealization of lyric as a universal genre, this paper focuses on the practice of poetic metre in the nineteenth century. How did Victorian conceptions of recitational communities, bounded by shared ‘national’ metres, square against the wealth of translated works that were a major component of Victorian print culture? The amateur Orientalist Ebenezer Pocock explained various metres and musical practices associated with ‘Persian lyrics’ in his book Flowers of the East (1833) and offered equivalent metres in English before replicating these shared English/Persian metres in his own imitative poem ‘The Khanjgaruh: A Fragment’. This article sketches how Pocock's casting of this hybrid material in metres that would already have been recognizable to his English readers seems to have the intended effect of both orienting his work towards his domestic audience and grounding such a flexible approach within the Persian tradition itself. Pocock's poem sits amongst a range of accompanying materials including translations of Sa‘dī and scholarly essays on comparative philology and Persian literary history. Each of these different pieces supports the collection's greater effort – best encapsulated by ‘The Khanjgaruh’ – to both remember and imagine the shared poetic history between Asia and Europe. Pocock's writing thus emblemizes how the nineteenth-century ‘West–East lyric’ was a product of both historical and philological recovering as well as the willed creation of poets and poetry enthusiasts. As a category, lyric performs a binding function in Pocock's work to pull together a linguistically and professionally diverse community of writers.
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Lankewish, Vincent A. "LOVE AMONG THE RUINS: THE CATACOMBS, THE CLOSET, AND THE VICTORIAN “EARLY CHRISTIAN” NOVEL." Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 2 (2000): 239–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150300282016.
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Catacomb, n., a subterranean place for the burial of the dead, consisting of galleries or passageways with recesses excavated in their sides for tombs.The Oxford English DictionarySilence itself — the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers — is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.Michel Foucault, The History of SexualityWe often assume (rightly) that homosexuality must be hidden, that it has to be found.Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man?I. Ruining the Religious NovelBY TITLING THIS ESSAY “Love Among the Ruins,” I mean at once to be literal, figurative, and allusive in the framing of my topic: literal, in that I will be examining the place of love — specifically, erotic love — within the Roman catacombs or equivalent sites of Christian sanctuary; figurative, in that the representations of love that I will be discussing occur within the context of “literary ruins” — that is, within a relatively obscure nineteenth-century English narrative sub-genre, the Victorian “Early Christian” novel1; and, finally, allusive, in that I deliberately invoke the first poem of Robert Browning’s 1855 collection of dramatic monologues, Men and Women, for more than mere rhetorical effect. In fact, “Love Among the Ruins” condenses a number of the key concerns that I want to address in this essay, for the poem offers an important critique of classical culture not only as a site of pagan aesthetic production and human vainglory, but, relatedly, of homosocial and, perhaps, homoerotic bonds and the sterility presumed to inhere therein — a critique highly visible in Victorian Early Christian fiction. Indeed, I would argue, Browning’s text implicitly participates in the discursive construction of an important, if ultimately unstable, dichotomy that Victorian novels set in the catacombs and written roughly around the same time as “Love Among the Ruins” powerfully reinforce: namely, the traditional opposition between classicism and Christianity, an opposition at least one facet of which is rooted in competing attitudes toward the erotic.
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Heath, Kay. "IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: VICTORIAN AGE CONSTRUCTION AND THE SPECULAR SELF." Victorian Literature and Culture 34, no. 1 (2006): 27–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150306051035.
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AT AGE FIFTY-TWO, THOMAS HARDYwas beginning to feel uneasy about aging. On October 11, 1892, he wrote to his friend Arthur Blomfield: “Hurt my tooth at breakfast-time. I look in the glass. Am conscious of the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle…. Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body!” (F. Hardy 13–14). This moment of specular disgust was ultimately recorded in a poem: I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, “Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!”For then, I, undistrestBy hearts grown cold to me,Could lonely wait my endless restWith equanimity.But Time, to make me grieve,Part steals, lets part abide;And shakes this fragile frame at eveWith throbbings of noontide. (T. Hardy,Complete Poems81)
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Sifaki, Evgenia. "MASCULINITY, HEROISM, AND THE EMPIRE: ROBERT BROWNING'S “CLIVE” AND OTHER VICTORIAN RE-CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE STORY OF ROBERT CLIVE." Victorian Literature and Culture 37, no. 1 (2009): 141–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150309090093.
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The core of this paperis a reading of Robert Browning's “Clive” (1880); it attempts to account for the formalist demands of this generically complex and relentlessly ironic poetic text, while at the same time it construes the accomplishment of Browning's poetic language and form as intricate cultural critique. However, in order to better understand Browning's poem an additional discussion of its intertexts is required, the most important being Thomas Babington Macaulay's essay “On Clive” (1840).
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Markovits, Stefanie. "Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage, and the Victorian Crisis of Action." Nineteenth-Century Literature 55, no. 4 (2001): 445–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2001.55.4.445.
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Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage (1858) provides a revealing lens through which to explore the implications for genre of the changing status of action in the nineteenth century. For historical reasons, conceptions of action shifted in the Victorian period, leading most notably to a decrease in the legibility of deeds. The shift opened up a critical dispute concerning the relative importance of the Aristotelian categories of character and action in literature. This dispute resulted in an emphasis on a literature of inaction - both frustrated external action and heightened internal action - which in turn had consequences for the development of the novel as a genre concerned with character and states of consciousness. Clough's own Hamlet-like inability to act is the stuff of legend, and his hero Claude suffers from the same affliction, as is made manifest by the failed courtship plot of the poem. Amours de Voyage, as an epistolary novel in verse, in mock-epic hexameters interspersed with lyrical elegiacs, stands at the place where genres - and the different attitudes toward action that they represent - collide. Both its subject matter and its method reflect the Victorian crisis of action.
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Stern, Rebecca F. ""Adulterations Detected": Food and Fraud in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"." Nineteenth-Century Literature 57, no. 4 (2003): 477–511. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2003.57.4.477.
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Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" (1862) has garnered seemingly limitless critical interpretation —— the goblins' remarkable fruit inviting allegorical readings of the poem that reference, most popularly, Christianity, sexuality, and capitalism. In this essay I read fruit simply as food, situating the poem within the context of food adulteration contemporary with its 1859 composition. Food adulteration was a widespread problem in Victorian England, as increasing numbers of merchants cut flour with alum, doctored curry with mercury, and enhanced the appearance of potted fruits and vegetables with copper and lead. Public alarm regarding this form of fraud reached its height in the 1850s, largely due to the work of an independent Analytical Sanitary Commission, which published its findings in The Lancet between 1851 and 1854. While Parliament responded to these reports with the formation of a Select Committee in 1855, the popular press responded with articles, tracts, and ballads addressing this pandemic problem. Manuals that instructed consumers how to protect themselves by acquiring the accoutrements of home laboratories proliferated, as did references to adulteration in popular literature. In this essay I read Rossetti's poem as an example of this type of reference. The market of the poem's title, I argue, references a literally contaminated marketplace in which the numbers of people who ate ostensibly nutritious food, only to wither and die in consequence, provoked both governmental and popular alarm.
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Kroll, Allison Adler. "Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion / The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound." Journal of Victorian Culture 20, no. 2 (2015): 275–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2015.1024047.
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Kuo, Wen-Hua. "Understanding Race at the Frontier of Pharmaceutical Regulation: An Analysis of the Racial Difference Debate at the ICH." Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 36, no. 3 (2008): 498–505. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-720x.2008.297.x.
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Reflecting on the tension of which he was aware between the imperial West and the still-mysterious East, Victorian writer Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) penned the above phrase to express the incommensurable situation wherein the Westerner never understands the Asian, as the latter’s culture differs too greatly from his own. However, aware that East and West nevertheless cannot remain separated forever, the author ends the poem with an eventual encounter between the two.Over 100 years have passed since this poem was written, yet the ambivalent encounter between East and West that it depicts still exists and is currently playing out within the field of pharmaceuticals. On one side of the divide are the many people in the industry who want to standardize global acceptance of drugs; on the other are the local authorities who want to maintain the overruling legal need not to compromise on health care at a national level. In this sense, the divergence and unity that Kipling captures is what this paper aims to discuss as it addresses how race is debated at the International Conference on Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH).
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Freer, Scott. "Remediating ‘Prufrock’." Arts 9, no. 4 (2020): 104. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/arts9040104.
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This article examines remediated examples of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915). Eliot’s innovative dramatic monologue has sustained an enduring inter-media afterlife, mainly because visual artists generally capitalized on the poem’s residual Victorian painterly and semi-narrative qualities. Here I look at a wider range of visual forms from old and new media that, for both pedagogic and artistic purposes, remediate the poem’s ekphrastic, semi-narrative and modernist aesthetics: the comic strip, the animated film, the dramatic monologue film, the split-screen video poem and the photographic spatial montage. Together, they demonstrate the dialogic and multi-directional nature of remediation and articulate via inter-media strategies various literary properties and themes (e.g., character, setting, visual motifs, paralysis) of ‘Prufrock’.
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Riddell, Fraser. "Disembodied Vocal Innocence: John Addington Symonds, the Victorian Chorister, and Queer Musical Consumption." Victorian Literature and Culture 48, no. 3 (2020): 485–517. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150319000020.
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In the early 1890s, both John Addington Symonds and Arthur Symons were fascinated by Paul Verlaine's sonnet “Parsifal” (1886)—in particular, by its final line, which dwells on the voices of singing children. Symonds enthused to Symons that it was “a line [to] treasure forever,” while, nevertheless, noting his reservations to Horatio Forbes Brown that “fine as it is, [it] looks like it […] must be rather of the sickly school.” In an article on Verlaine, Symons praised the poem as a “triumph [of] amazing virtuosity,” echoing the sentiments of his friend George Moore, who in Confessions of a Young Man (1886) exclaimed that he “kn[ew] of no more perfect thing than this sonnet.” With its repetition of assonant vowel sounds, Verlaine's closing line captures the gentle rise heavenward of the ethereal voices of Richard Wagner's offstage choristers, resounding above the stage at the conclusion of the opera. The hiatus with which the line opens functions as a sigh of renunciation, as the listeners abandon themselves to the inexpressible force of the transcendent. In Verlaine's sonnet, these children's voices become the epitome of the “disembodied voice” that Symons sees as so characteristic of Decadent poetics. They sing of the delicate immateriality of spiritual experience, the transient fragility of existence.
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Barrett, Tim. "Zen and the “Image” in Tang Poetry." British Journal of Chinese Studies 10 (July 2, 2020): 1–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.51661/bjocs.v10i0.58.
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The purpose of the title of this piece is to suggest that behind the bland exterior of the average medieval Chinese poem (at least in English translation) there may lurk processes of composition entirely unsuspected by the modern reader, aspects of the Tang poem that might repay greater study. This approach, namely meditation as a method of creative inspiration, was far from universal in the poetry of the Tang period, since it seems to have arisen within specific historical circumstances, and though references to it remained and were handed down to later ages in widely read works, it is at present unclear how actively it was practised in later times. However, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that an interest in poetic imagery remained strong in East Asia, raising the possibility that it was this aspect of poetic practice there caught the attention of English language poets in the United Kingdom at the start of the twentieth century as they cast about for new models to replace the poetry of Victorian times. The hope is that drawing attention to this approach to poetic inspiration in this essay may serve as a challenge to the current lack of interest in Chinese poetry translation in the United Kingdom.
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Jackson, Virginia. "Specters of the Ballad." Nineteenth-Century Literature 71, no. 2 (2016): 176–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2016.71.2.176.
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Virginia Jackson, “Specters of the Ballad” (pp. 176–196) This essay argues that Paul Laurence Dunbar’s ballad “The Haunted Oak” (1901) indexes Dunbar’s invention of the modern American lyric through the (lynching) form of modern racism. How does race ghost-write poetry’s redefinition around the lyric? How does it create a dramatically abstract “speaker” that gives voice to and for an imagined community? Dunbar inverts both romantic apostrophe and Victorian dramatic monologue and dialogue in his speaking bough. He does this by framing his poem as a pre-romantic border ballad, a tale of Scots rebellion and English law superimposed upon American racist violence. What Jacqueline Goldsby has dubbed “racism’s modern life form” thus becomes modern American poetry’s life form, a lyricized poetic history haunted from root to branch.
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Chuilleanáin, Eiléan Ní. "The Ages of a Woman and the Middle Ages." Irish University Review 45, no. 2 (2015): 199–214. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/iur.2015.0172.
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This essay springs from the experience of translating the Old Irish ‘Song of the Woman of Beare’, and from researching its reception in the twentieth century. The poem was rediscovered in the 1890s and the scholarly reaction is tinged with Victorian preoccupations, including the bohemian cult of François Villon. In Ireland it is aligned with Pearse's ‘Mise Éire’, and with the work of later poets such as Austin Clarke. But as well as voicing the ancient text, the Woman of Beare appears in folklore in both Ireland and Scotland, and there are interesting parallels and divergences between the traditions of scholarship and the figure in the popular imagination. My account of the impact of both text and myth shows a development through the mid-twentieth century and into the twenty-first, in the work of poets writing in both Irish and English. In recent decades the work of women poets has engaged with the myths of the Cailleach as Goddess, and they have thus confronted questions of the legitimacy of treating the past, and especially mythology and folk beliefs, as a source for poetry. I believe it would be foolish for a poet who has the knowledge and critical intelligence to do it properly to ignore such a resource.