VICTORIAN POETRY最新文献

{"title":"Victorian Women's Poetry and the Near-Death Experience of a Category","authors":"Lee O'Brien","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933698","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Victorian Women’s Poetry and the Near-Death Experience of a Category <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lee O’Brien (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>Whatever we plan, the future will deal with it in its own way.</p> Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak </blockquote> <p><strong>I</strong>n her introduction to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” Linda K. Hughes formulated the purpose of the special edition as a collective endeavor to “conceive and reconfigure the field” (459). Looking at the table of contents of <em>Victorian Poetry</em> and the Guides to the Year’s Work since 2003, it is clear that the field was reconfigured in ways that the writers predicted but also in ways they did not foresee. My vision that a vast cohort of forgotten women poets would be unearthed through archival research and studied and taught, bringing entirely new insights into what the lyric meant in the Victorian period, especially outside professional literary circles, did not eventuate to the extent I’d hoped. James Najarian’s observation that scholars were “not necessarily writing about newly rediscovered work as about works familiar to them” (2003, p. 570) was therefore timely as well as prescient. Completely new poets did not routinely take their place beside established names, or (preferably, as I thought then) displace them entirely.<sup>1</sup> Spivak’s observation about the uncertain relationship between plans and a fundamentally unknowable and rather willful future provides a provisional map of the energies shaping change: stability and the forces that disrupt it still clash in ways that provide both answers and dilemmas when it comes to the future of Victorian poetry. Hughes’s questions regarding the interplay between a “sense of fundamental change” and “the professional machinery” (p. 459) in which such change must be negotiated, are more pressing now than they were then.</p> <p>Thinking about Victorian women’s poetry in 2023 raises old questions—the canon (redux)—and a host of new anxieties. How is difference to <strong>[End Page 455]</strong> be acknowledged, not as a reflection of scholarly and institutional fashion, but as a perpetual and welcome reality? In 2023 many journal articles and monographs still concentrate on poets who were already receiving attention in 2003 and before. The <em>Victorian Poetry</em> Guides to the Year’s Work (2003–2021) reflect a scholarly focus on well known poets that remains remarkably stable. There are separate sections for Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Swinburne, and Tennyson. Subject categories—Poets of the Nineties, the Pre-Raphaelites (occasionally Pre-Raphaelitism), Women Poets (beginning in 2010)—provide variations from the revised canon that are reflected in work of the type where reassessment is announced in the tile. Patricia Murphy’s well-receiv","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"60 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Undisciplining Art Sisterhood","authors":"Michele Martinez","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933699","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Undisciplining Art Sisterhood <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michele Martinez (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>W</strong>hen asked to contribute to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” in 2003, I was fortunate to benefit from feminist scholarship that sought to understand the networks of support and collaboration between Romantic and Victorian women poets and visual artists.<sup>1</sup> Additionally, cultural studies on word-and-image history and interpretation brought attention to the gender, class, and political dynamics that shaped the theory and reception of the fine arts in Britain as well as the creation of national art institutions.<sup>2</sup> My essay addressed ways that women poets and art critics capitalized on the gender and genre hierarchies of sister arts discourse to celebrate the reality of women’s professional success.<sup>3</sup> My current research continues to investigate ways that poets and artists created sisterhood and contributed to Britain’s expansive arts culture.<sup>4</sup> It is exciting to report that we can add new art sisters—engraving and photography—to the family of poetry, painting, and sculpture.<sup>5</sup> Thora Brylowe’s attention to the engraver’s struggle against the classism of antiquarians parallels my interest in the print media ecologies that promoted and reviewed British art.<sup>6</sup> In the 1860s and 1870s, photography critics debated the artistic merits of the medium and regarded any kind of experimentation as sloppy, deviant, or worst of all, effeminate. Julia Margaret Cameron recognized that joining sisterly forces with the poet laureate Tennyson would lend much needed authority to her boldly expressive prints.<sup>7</sup></p> <p>The recognition of class and gender bias in sister arts discourse is important and necessary. However, it is also essential to expand our understanding of “sisterhood,” which is often a trope of solidarity among women that must be scrutinized and questioned in context. The call to “undiscipline” Victorian studies prompts me to ask whether sisterhood might constitute a form of ally-ship between poets and visual artists and include an array of gender, sexual, and racial identities within a transimperial context.<sup>8</sup> Romantic and Victorian art sisters typically found solidarity within local media ecologies and familial networks close to home. However, I want to suggest thinking about sister arts allyship in the broader context of nineteenth-century immigration and colonialism. Doing so allows us to explore ways in which Victorian artists offer <strong>[End Page 475]</strong> allyship to minoritized artists today and to consider that contemporary poets might extend sisterhood to the nineteenth-century artists who found few allies in their lifetime.</p> <p>In pushing disciplinary boundaries and drawing on new critical frameworks, I will address examples of a","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reaching Wider: Anecdotes from a Victorianist in the Australian Archive","authors":"Jason Rudy","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933702","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Reaching Wider: <span>Anecdotes from a Victorianist in the Australian Archive</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jason Rudy (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>T</strong>wenty years ago, when asked where the field of Victorian poetry was headed, my answer focused on methodology and a term—“cultural neoformalism”—that seemed useful in situating my own doctoral work in relation to the field.<sup>1</sup> I was just young enough to have witnessed the aftermath of disciplinary acrimony among historicists, formalists, and theorists (the so-called culture wars of the 1980s), and the yoking of cultural studies to formalist methods seemed like a way out of the woods and on to greener pastures.<sup>2</sup> A Rutgers University conference organized by Meredith McGill in 2002 on “The Traffic in Poems” had showcased scholarship in a transatlantic frame and a range of methods that largely reflected this intersection of culture and form, and I was smitten.<sup>3</sup></p> <p>Not long after, I was invited to join a reading group on “Historical Poetics,” a coming together of nineteenth-century Americanists and Victorianists with interests in poetry and poetics.<sup>4</sup> Roughly inspired by the conversations staged at McGill’s 2002 conference, we took to reading poetic treatises like Sidney Lanier’s <em>The Science of English Verse</em> (1880) and Coventry Patmore’s <em>Essay on English Metrical Law</em> (1856), alongside nineteenth-century poems, working from the belief that ideas about poetry are and have always been malleable and historically situated. A good amount of the scholarship most influential on my thinking over the past two decades has emerged from the Historical Poetics group, including but not limited to Meredith Martin’s pathbreaking study of culture and poetic form, <em>The Rise and Fall of Meter</em> (2012); Charles LaPorte’s intervention in nineteenth-century religion and poetry, <em>Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible</em> (2011); Tricia Lootens’s revisionist reading of women poets and race, <em>The Political Poetess</em> (2017); and the monumental <em>Lyric Theory Reader</em> (2014) assembled by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins.<sup>5</sup> <strong>[End Page 521]</strong></p> <p>At roughly the same time as McGill’s conference, while I was finishing my dissertation, this journal published its Spring 2002 special issue on the topic “Nineteenth-Century Australian Poetry.” Meg Tasker and E. Warwick Slinn, the editors of that volume, assembled provocative essays on Charles Harpur, Henry Lawson, and Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, among other important Australian poets, none of whom I recognized. I was on the verge of earning a doctorate in nineteenth-century British literature, with an especial focus on poetry, yet I knew nothing of what had been happening in nineteenth-century Australia—nor, as it happened, in any of Britain’s other ","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"61 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Analog Intelligence","authors":"Andrew M. Stauffer","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933705","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Analog Intelligence <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Andrew M. Stauffer (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>T</strong>wenty summers, with the length of twenty long winters: it’s a little epoch, the two decades that have passed since the “Whither Victorian Poetry?” issue appeared. Back then, I stressed the importance of physical books and their place within our institutions and our field, with a weather eye on the rapidly evolving digital technologies that were poised to transform our apprehension of the historical materials we study as scholars of Victorian poetry. Have they ever. As we look ahead through the thicket of social media towards the AI-generated text-and-mediascape that is just around the corner, we may find the nineteenth-century material record more urgently necessary than before. In 2023, scholars, teachers, and most of all students of Victorian literature and culture need physical books and libraries that manage collections of those artifacts of analog intelligence.</p> <p>In 2003, digital technologies had made relatively narrow inroads: no Facebook, no Twitter, no YouTube, no WordPress, no Gmail. Incredibly, no smartphones. Digitization had just begun to change the ways we accessed scholarship and primary texts. Project MUSE and JSTOR had each concluded their first decade of existence and still had plenty of room to grow. In 2003, JSTOR contained only about three hundred academic journal titles across all fields. It is now ten times that size.<sup>1</sup> ProQuest was moving forward in its digitization of nineteenth-century materials, but it wasn’t at all clear how extensive the collections they were building were going to be. Perhaps most significantly, there was no Google Books (or HathiTrust), meaning that online coverage of nineteenth-century printed books was still very small in scale. Scholars of Victorian poetry in 2003 had to spend a lot of time in brick-and-mortar libraries, looking things up in books, hunting down allusions, locating sources, and gathering information by hand. Several years later, John Walsh could report as news the fact that “when a web user searches the internet, he or she searches the nineteenth century.”<sup>2</sup> In a now-almost-touching use of the word <em>remote</em>, Walsh also celebrated the fact that Victorian material could increasingly be accessed “free from the traditional confines of often remote archives and libraries,” and observed quite rightly that “scholars <strong>[End Page 553]</strong> of nineteenth-century British and American literature are awash with an ever-growing number of high-quality digital resources.” Awash and sailing forth: the early 2000s were a utopian moment for Victorian digital literary scholarship. Thanks to Jerome McGann and many others, the Rossetti Archive was up and running, and NINES was about to emerge to federate a large number of first-genera","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"128 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Robert Browning","authors":"Suzanne Bailey","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915656","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915656","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Robert Browning <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Suzanne Bailey (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Romantic legacies, Browning and Orientalism, Browning’s language and poetic practice, gender, and materialist approaches to Browning’s poetry are some of the themes that emerge in publications on Browning this year. A new book on the Brownings and the Shelleys by Reiko Suzuki suggests a novel perspective on Browning’s relationship to Romanticism, arguing for the underexamined influence of Mary Shelley’s writing. Among her explorations, Suzuki makes the <strong>[End Page 353]</strong> intriguing suggestion that <em>Paracelsus</em> (1835) can be read along with Mary Shelley’s <em>Frankenstein</em> (1818). François Crampe explores mesmerism as a trope in Browning’s early poetry, noting that while the poet is skeptical about the practice, mesmerism offers a model for patterns of influence and will in the poetry. Orientalism, race, and culture are considered by Reza Taher-Kermani and Hanan Khaled Al-Jezawi. Taher-Kermani’s work further defines Middle Eastern representations and tropes in Victorian poetry, highlighting an under-examined dimension to Browning’s work.</p> <p>The enduring interest of Browning’s metrical experiments is suggested in Kristin Hanson and Nigel Fabb’s analysis of meter in “Pietro of Abano” (1880) in the <em>Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America</em>. Hanson and Fabb propose new ways of modeling Browning’s prosody in the context of linear and generative theories of meter. Ewan Jones and Michael Rizq explore Browning’s language in their respective readings of <em>Fifine at the Fair</em> (1872) and <em>The Ring and the Book</em> (1868–1869). Jones traces the meanings of the arabesque in art history and in Browning’s poetic practice, while Rizq connects syntax and sound in <em>The Ring and the Book</em> to the poem’s interpretive challenges. Patrick Fessenbecker makes the case for the importance of content as much as aesthetic form in communicating ideas in literary works, using Browning’s irony as a test case and drawing attention to the Victorian interest in conveying truth as a value in literature. Both Heather Hind and Jill Rappoport take gender-based and materialist approaches to Browning’s poetry: Hind considers historical practices connected to the harvesting of hair as an artifact in “Gold Hair, A Story of Pornic” (1864) and Rappoport considers gold in <em>The Ring and the Book</em> (1868–1869) in the context of married women’s economic agency and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870.</p> <p>Briefer references to Browning document his creative impact on other authors. We see, for instance, how “My Last Duchess” (1842) has been reworked by writers from Edith Wharton to Henry James, or how “The Lost Leader” (1845) has been taken up by Robert Frost. In one of the most intriguing examples, Timothy Hampton notes","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138817929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tennyson","authors":"Linda K. Hughes","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915661","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Tennyson <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Linda K. Hughes (bio) </li> </ul> <p>No book-length study of Alfred Tennyson appeared during 2022, but <em>The Crimean War in Victorian Poetry</em> by Tai-Chun Ho (Peter Lang, 2021) offers sustained engagement with Tennyson’s poetry. This sociohistorical, intertextual literary study considers the troubled role of the noncombatant poet (or “armchair” poet) in an era of war correspondents, telegraphs, and mass print. Faced with current reports of Crimean troubles on one hand, Victorian poets faced on the other their legacy of war poetry, including the <em>Iliad</em>, that glorified war and heroism. Poets who invoked glory or patriotism while sitting snugly at home when British soldiers far from home faced inadequate supply chains, insufficient medical attendance, and officers’ blunders could invite condemnation. Yet realist representations of soldiers’ suffering in war could repel or distress prospective readers. Ho’s achievement, which builds on earlier studies by Stefanie Markovits and Trudi Tate, is to set these questions in a broad poetic as well as transmedial context that illuminates evolving traditions of war poetry as well as Tennyson’s own diction and perspectives. Ho claims the <strong>[End Page 407]</strong> status of double poems for much of what he examines, since Victorian war poetry presented “the armchair poet’s struggle to voice the unspeakable and to depict a war that was being reported in newspapers” while also incorporating “a socio-political critique that require[d] the reader to explore the dramatized speaker’s engagement with the conflict as an object of analysis” (p. 45).</p> <p>Ho sets the stage by examining the Tyrtaean tradition of war poetry, so named from Tyrtaeus, the Spartan warrior poet. Thomas Campbell’s translation of Tyrtaeus’s martial elegy opens, “How glorious fall the valiant, sword in hand, / In front of battle for their native land!” (p. 219). These lines are echoed, Ho suggests in chapter 5, in Tennyson’s monodrama, when the speaker describes Maud’s military ballad—an echo likely recognized by Tennyson’s readers. Newspaper poems by civilian poets Tom Taylor, Louisa Shore, and Tennyson shifted war poetry from Tyrtaean glory to soldiers’ suffering (Taylor), their bravery that left a civilian poet little to say by contrast (Shore, in a <em>Spectator</em> poem that first rhymed “thunder” and “wonder”), or soldiers’ suffering <em>and</em> bravery (Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”). Civilian poets were inherently unable to accommodate roles of warrior-poets; hence, Tennyson subtly distanced his point of view from battle in “Charge” so that readers never see the soldiers, only their swords flashing in air (ll. 27–28), leaving civilians back home to “wonder.”</p> <p>Thomas Campbell’s “The Soldier’s Dream” (1804) was an alternative influence on Vict","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138817824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unique Forms of Ekphrasis: The Keepsake and the Illustrative Poetry of the Literary Annuals","authors":"Michael Carelse","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915653","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915653","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Unique Forms of Ekphrasis: <span><em>The Keepsake</em> and the Illustrative Poetry of the Literary Annuals</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael Carelse (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Introduction</h2> <p>The poems that appear alongside engravings in the literary annuals of the 1820s–1850s have frequently been described as “ekphrastic” works, in that they describe the engravings they accompany.<sup>1</sup> However, the term <em>ekphrasis</em>—commonly defined as “the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art”<sup>2</sup>—does not entirely capture many of the context-specific ways in which poems and engravings interact with each other on the material page of the literary annuals. Many definitions of ekphrasis exist. The term originally derives “from the Greek roots <em>ek</em>—out or full—and <em>phrazein</em>—to speak or tell,” and was originally “a rhetorical exercise whereby something was rendered visible for the listener.”<sup>3</sup> Some modern scholars have continued to define ekphrasis in this more abstract way as a kind of representational mode—for example, as a “form of vivid evocation that may have as its subject matter anything—an action, a place, a battle, even a crocodile.”<sup>4</sup> Others have adopted more concrete and simplistic definitions—for example, “the verbal representation of graphic representation.”<sup>5</sup> Any of these definitions of ekphrasis apply accurately to the poems that accompany engravings in the pages of literary annuals: in all of these ways, the poems describe the engravings. However, these poems describe engravings in particular ways that are unique to the publication format of literary annuals, and as such they present unique forms of ekphrasis that are not yet theorized in current definitions of ekphrasis or in studies of literary annuals. Namely, these poems present forms of ekphrasis that are uniquely characterized by the poems’ functions as literal and conceptual accompaniments to the engravings—typically commissioned to accompany the engraving, the poems were printed alongside the engravings and meant to enhance the reader’s experience of seeing the engravings in the annual. Thus, the poems were not attempting the kind of “vivid evocation” typical of ekphrastic works, because the image being evoked was already available for viewing next to the <strong>[End Page 301]</strong> poem. Instead, the poems interacted more subtly with the engravings. Sometimes the poems compliment the skill of the engraver or otherwise overtly acknowledge the presence of the engraving; sometimes the poems address the subject of the engraving through poetic apostrophe, add dialogue to animate the subject of an engraving, or direct the reader’s attention to a particular aspect of the engraving. Many poems also make no reference to the engraving or to their own status as accompaniments t","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138817928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thomas Hardy","authors":"Galia Benziman","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915657","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Thomas Hardy <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Galia Benziman (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Aspects of language, sound, and poetic form, alongside themes related to evolution, animals, and posthumanism, continued to engage critics of Thomas Hardy’s poetry this year. Hardy’s numerous intertextual relations and poetic influence were also an ongoing object of interest. Gender, marriage, and their connection to Hardy’s biography occupied a smaller space this year, although these topics were not entirely absent from the critical conversation. Critics kept returning to well-known and often-discussed poems like “The Darkling Thrush” or “Hap,” illuminating them with fresh insight.</p> <p>The chief emphases last year were placed on poetics on the one hand and the environment on the other. Focused on the latter topic, a few intriguing studies offer new insights. Hardy was not only keenly interested in animals—birds in particular—and the natural environment, but was also among the earliest voices to interrogate the presumptions of anthropocentrism and human supremacy. Several essays and books published this year include nuanced observations on this aspect of Hardy’s work. In <em>Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), Francesca Mackenney devotes a comprehensive chapter to this theme. Titled “‘We Teach ’Em Airs That Way’: Thomas Hardy” (pp. 137–179), the chapter places Hardy’s writing in the post-Darwinian context of the dispute regarding the relationship between language and thought and the “widespread mistreatment of ‘dumb’ creatures that Hardy decried as illogical and inhumane” (p. 137). His poetry “sought to reveal an underlying kinship between all races and classes of human beings, and ‘the whole conscious world collectively’”—a claim that Mackenney probes by reading a wide range of Hardy’s bird poems, from his most famous pieces, such as “The Darkling Thrush” and “The Blinded Bird,” to lesser known lyrics such as “The Spring Call” and “The Puzzled Game-Birds,” as well as children’s poems. Throughout his writing, Hardy draws attention to how the politics of “essential difference” has been covertly used to justify not only the mistreatment of animals but also “slavery, war and the worst atrocities that <strong>[End Page 371]</strong> human beings have committed against their own kind” (p. 143). As part of his revision of Romanticism, Hardy “appropriated the bird’s song for [his] own purposes” to depict an actual creature “mortally vulnerable to the reality of hardship and cruelty in a post-Darwinian world” (p. 162). For Hardy as a post-Romantic, poetic idealization risks losing sight of the living creature (p. 163). The “preservation of the finest ideals of Romanticism” depends on “reckoning with, as opposed to escaping from, the reality of cruelty in a dar","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"78 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138817934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Love in a Time of Extinction: Poetic Category and Temporal Impasse in Robert Browning's \"Love Among the Ruins\"","authors":"John McBratney","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915651","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Love in a Time of Extinction: <span>Poetic Category and Temporal Impasse in Robert Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins”</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> John McBratney (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>A</strong>s the first poem in <em>Men and Women</em> (1855), Robert Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins” sets the main theme for the collection, establishing (so it seems) in its final line—“Love is best”—a scale of value in heterosexual relationships against which the treatment of romantic intimacy can be gauged in other poems in the volume.<sup>1</sup> Yet why, as the title of the poem denotes, would Browning set such an all-important human emotion—and such a lyric poem—among the ruins of an ancient city? What connection can there be between two such seemingly ill-sorted entities as romantic passion and antique urban ruins? And how might the yoking of two such disparate themes as eros and an ancient city’s ruination bear on the matter of the poem’s category?<sup>2</sup></p> <p>To answer these questions, we might put critical responses to the poem into two clusters grouped around the two key terms from its title. Critics in the first cluster (by far the larger of the two) have been concerned with the degree to which readers ought to assent to the final line’s bald declaration of love’s preeminent worth. Some insist that we believe it without question, others insist just as vehemently that we view it ironically, and still others feel deeply uncertain whether we ought to find it credible. Critics in the second, smaller cluster have focused more narrowly, in a kind of archaeological source hunting, on linking the ruins in the poem to actual historical ruins—some of them under excavation during the time of the poem’s composition—that might have served as inspiration for the urban remains in Browning’s verse. To each cluster, we might assign a suitable category—the love poem for the first and what Susan Stewart calls the “ruins narrative” for the second—as a pair of lenses through which to examine the themes of romantic passion in the present and the ruination of civilizations in the past.<sup>3</sup> This examination is especially <strong>[End Page 267]</strong> critical in analyzing the interest that both categories in this poem take in the phenomenon of extinction. By exploring this shared interest, we can see not only why these two apparently incompatible partners might belong together in this poem but also how their interaction problematizes the poem’s closing motto.<sup>4</sup> As I hope to show in a revisionist reading of the poem, although we are enjoined to assent to this motto’s declaration, that assent entails acknowledgment of a daunting temporal and romantic impasse—one that prepares readers for the fraught connection between love and time in many of the remaining poems in <em>Men and Women</em>. I conclude by glancing at tw","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138818120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gerard Manley Hopkins","authors":"Veronica Alfano","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915658","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915658","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Gerard Manley Hopkins <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Veronica Alfano (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Last year’s Hopkins scholarship provided a pleasing balance between close attention to the subtleties of the poet’s language and wide-ranging claims about his legacy.</p> <p>Emma Mason’s article “Reading Christian Experience” (<em>Modern Language Quarterly</em> 83, no. 4 [2022]: 521–537) is provocative and powerfully written. She views the work of Hopkins and Christina Rossetti through the lens of kenosis—that is, the doctrine that Christ emptied himself of divinity in order to become fully human and submit to death. For both poets, says Mason, kenosis redefines Christianity through “inner stillness, deferential being, and humility” (p. 523). Furthermore, both writers gender this concept, with Rossetti using it to adumbrate a feminized version of spiritual authority and Hopkins enlisting it as a model of ideal gentlemanliness. As Mason demonstrates—via one of Hopkins’s biblical exegeses in an 1883 letter to Robert Bridges and via his 1883 poem “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe”—this poet “offers a direct critique of muscular models of Christianity, promoting instead a vulnerable and uncertain ideal” as he implicitly compares Christ to “a Victorian gentleman who signifies and acts like a Victorian woman” (pp. 530–531). <strong>[End Page 382]</strong></p> <p>Here a bit more exploration of the ramifications of these gender-related claims would have been welcome. To what extent is Rossetti challenging the “pretense that humility and passivity are necessarily ‘female’” (p. 527), and to what extent is she implying that Christ’s patient humbleness makes him womanly? And in light of Hopkins’s tormented relationship to his own sexuality, what does it mean for him to feminize Christ?</p> <p>All the same, throughout the article, Mason elegantly broadens the relevance of her theological analysis. Rossetti’s interest in the Tractarian principle of analogy is shown to rely on a kenotic “image of unity in diversity” (p. 530), as is Hopkins’s understanding of Mary as both fleshly and spiritual, as is the essential paradox of the Trinity itself. Mason’s closing arguments are her most ambitious: acknowledging that many modern readers will recoil from the focus on feminized self-abnegation she identifies in Hopkins, she counters that kenosis is in fact profoundly anti-fundamentalist. Because it is “predicated on a vulnerable model of power that directly rejects relationships structured by oppression or violence” (p. 534), it can motivate Christian models of social justice, ecological activism, and feminism (which she links to Hopkins’s praise of Mary in “The Blessed Virgin”). And because kenosis demands “a reading practice that perceives and understands relationships not as linear or binary but as coinherent, multiple, and interconnected” ","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"195 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138817833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}