VICTORIAN POETRY最新文献

{"title":"\"The child's sob in the silence curses deeper\": Language of Voice and Dialogue of Reform in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's \"The Cry of the Children\"","authors":"Reilly L. Fitzpatrick","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915652","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 --> “The child’s sob in the silence curses deeper”: <span>Language of Voice and Dialogue of Reform in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children”</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Reilly L. Fitzpatrick (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>L</strong>ike many of her literary contemporaries, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her poetic work have been reevaluated in recent years to determine whether her status as a white, educated, upper-middle-class woman disqualifies her from effectively advocating for marginalized populations—such as factory workers or enslaved women—since she did not experience their oppression firsthand. Increasingly cognizant of the use of privileged literary voices to appropriate and perpetuate oppression throughout history, scholars have recently identified and critiqued many authors that misrepresent and profit from marginalized experiences that are not their own. In considering the ethical and literary dimensions of this ongoing issue of representation, the language of voice is central. Does an author speak on behalf of those for whom they advocate, or speak instead of them? Is an author attempting to give a silenced population the opportunity to be heard, or to be a “voice for the voiceless” when they are actively participating in and benefiting from the cultural systems that silence those who could otherwise speak for themselves?<sup>1</sup> In this article, I ask these questions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 poem “The Cry of the Children” to determine whether her effort to advocate for industrial reform through verse creates space for silenced voices to speak or ultimately appropriates the suffering of working children to further her poetic reputation or artistic vision.</p> <p>“The Cry of the Children” is alternatingly voiced by children working in British industrial contexts and a narrator; the poem explicates the brutality of children’s work in factories and mines and calls for widespread reform. EBB<sup>2</sup> belonged to the upper middle class and, as one contemporary reviewer points out, joins the protest against factory and mining industrialization without ever <strong>[End Page 285]</strong> having “visited one of those ‘hives of industry’” herself.<sup>3</sup> From her privileged background, EBB’s only encounters with the working-class experience were mediated through various literary portrayals and publicized reports on factory and mine conditions. By writing a poem that speaks in the voices of these oppressed children and not just on their behalf, EBB seems to participate in the performative act of being a voice for the voiceless. Her poem articulates the cries <em>of</em> the children, not cries <em>for</em> them: as EBB assumes joint poetic speaker-ship through her narrator and the children, she utilizes her poetic authority not only to speak in an imagined narrative voice on beh","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"248 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138817925","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":"Elizabeth Barrett Browning","authors":"Beverly Taylor","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915655","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915655","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 --> Elizabeth Barrett Browning <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Beverly Taylor (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Once again, the most important contribution this year to EBB studies is a new volume of <em>The Brownings’ Correspondence</em> (Wedgestone Press, 2023). With volume 29 of the series, gathering the Brownings’ correspondence for February 1861 through November 1861, general editor Philip Kelley and his collaborator Edward Hagan bring the collection of meticulously edited letters by both Brownings and some of their correspondents up to the date when EBB died (Robert describes her final night, June 29, 1861, to his father and sister Sarianna; pp. 164–168). Though she died just a little more than halfway through the volume’s letters, EBB remains its focal point throughout, for the volume includes multiple contemporary reviews: <em>A Drama of Exile; Poems</em> (1850); <em>Casa Guidi Windows</em>; <em>Poems</em> (1856); <em>Aurora Leigh</em>; <em>Poems before Congress</em>; and retrospective general review essays. It also includes a generous sampling of obituary notices, brief, full, and fulsome (pp. 371–399), as well as a reminiscence by Mary Ayrault Craig, who knew the Brownings in Florence and recalls their relationship in the early days as “an experiment in marriage, triumphant and conclusive” (p. 404). Appendix I provides biographical sketches of Kate Field and of Thomas Adolphus Trollope and his wife, the poet Theodosia Garrow Trollope, whom EBB knew from her time in Torquay, where she indicated a lack of enthusiasm for Garrow Trollope’s poetry. The second appendix, which quotes supporting documents, includes a wide range of recollections of EBB from letters and diaries, most of them recording some version of the sentiment that EBB was “as perfect as God permits in the flesh” and her death is a great “loss to the world!” (pp. 287, 306). The volume annotates the letters with splendidly precise and illuminating notes. Like the previous volumes in the series, volume 29 of <em>The Brownings’ Correspondence</em> represents a model of what a scholarly edition should be. <strong>[End Page 345]</strong></p> <p>The volume’s earliest letters record EBB’s total immersion in Italian politics. With her friend Isa Blagden she discusses the role of France in Italy’s future and the character of the French emperor, Napoleon III. Along the way she explains to Sarianna the importance of sculpting to Robert, who can write poetry only when inspired to do so (p. 37), and she corrects Fanny Haworth’s understanding of Swedenborgianism in relation to spiritualism (p. 42). Letters from and about Walter Savage Landor remind us how difficult it must have been for Robert to serve as his guardian, and of Robert’s generosity in taking on the charge. In multiple letters EBB reaffirms her intention to spend three months in France with Robert’s family, mindful that her","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":"138817921","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":"General Materials","authors":"Albert D. Pionke","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915654","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 --> General Materials <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Albert D. Pionke (bio) </li> </ul> <p>This year’s survey of general materials features four monographs and one substantial chapter from a broader genre history. All are committed to positioning Victorian poetry relative to its many predecessors—from gothic fictions and forms, to Enlightenment debates about speech, to classical Greek models of conversation, to Romantic theories of the lyric, to the multinational history of sonneteering—and all feature a mix of canonical and less-well-remembered authors and texts. In something of a departure from past years, Dante Gabriel Rossetti features particularly prominently.</p> <p>Acknowledging that the “lineage connecting Romantic Gothic fiction with nineteenth-century poetry is not an obvious one” (p. 3), Olivia Loksing Moy’s <em>The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry</em> (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2022) nevertheless seeks to bridge the genealogical gap between fiction of the 1790s and poetry of the 1830s through 1880s by reconceiving “of Gothic through a new fundamental organizing principle: as a set of formal structures that configure the relationships between speakers and their imagined audiences” (p. 4). Neither “a conventional influence study . . . nor one that insists on ‘anticipation’” (p. 15), the book remains invested a familiar model of “formal influence” (p. 2), according to which “the looming figure of ‘Mother [Ann] Radcliffe’” (p. 19)—and, to a lesser extent, her contemporaries William Godwin, Matthew Lewis, and Mary Wollstonecraft—bequeath “structural positionings and patterns of confinement” that are ironically re-presented in the Victorian period as “a distinctive poetics of Gothic enclosure” (p. 7). Moy’s principal “structural positionings,” that is, forms, include “Gothic confinement,” “forced confessions,” “Gothic framing,” and “Gothic swaps,” the ironized iterations of which are collectively traced through selected poetry from Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter EBB), Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Emily Brontë (p. 7).</p> <p>This process begins in chapter 1, which pairs passages from <em>The Italian</em> (1796), <em>The Mysteries of Udolpho</em> (1794), and <em>The Monk</em> (1796) that feature <strong>[End Page 337]</strong> incidents of overhearing with examples of dramatic monologic confession “overheard” by readers of Robert Browning’s <em>Pippa Passes</em> (1841), “The Confessional” (1845), “The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (1842), “Andrea del Sarto” (1855), and “Mister Sludge, ‘The Medium’” (1864). On the strength of these examples, Moy asserts that the “Gothic thus provides a thematic, structural, and cultural framework to better understand Victorian dramatic monologues,” whether written by Browning or others (p. 78). Chapter 2 revisits R","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"77 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138818115","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":"Algernon Charles Swinburne","authors":"Justin A. Sider","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915660","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 --> Algernon Charles Swinburne <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Justin A. Sider (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In these pages, a little over a decade ago, Alan Young-Bryant joked aptly that Algernon Charles Swinburne was “the most neglected recovered poet of the period” (“Swinburne: ‘The Sweetest Name,’” <em>VP</em> 49, no. 3 [2011]: 301). He meant that our narrow vision of the poet stinted the sheer scope and variety of his writing. If steady work has somewhat remedied this situation, today the remark also seems apt in a different sense, as Swinburne occupies rather less of the field’s attention than he did a decade or so ago. Scholarship on Swinburne is slight this year, though the four publications range nicely over the poet’s verse forms, intellectual affiliations, critical reception, and relation to cultural history.</p> <p>In <em>Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth- Century English Poetry</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), Elizabeth K. Helsinger explores the sociable forms of conversational poetry—poems committed to the political and ethical work of responding to others, to “that which is not the self” (p. 3). A chapter on Robert Browning and Swinburne proposes that these poet are <strong>[End Page 404]</strong> interested in “conditions of conversational asymmetry” (p. 56), where one party exercises power over another. For Swinburne, these are the conditions of tyranny, the domination of priests, kings, and gods. Helsinger’s chapter brings welcome attention to Swinburne’s verse dramas and to the genre more generally. In verse dramas like <em>Atalanta in Calydon</em> (1865) and <em>Erectheus</em> (1876), she argues, “the web of speech and song binding characters and chorus constitutes the real dramatic action” (p. 58). The Greek choruses are crucial to the radical aesthetic of Swinburne’s verse dramas. They form a strikingly active “participating community” (p. 58) that at once draws in modern readers and widens the perspective of these plays beyond the purview of their doomed heroes and heroines.</p> <p>In <em>Atalanta</em>, both the central characters and the chorus suffer the cruel whims of the gods, but in the exchanges between them, they also create “a singing-together in which the participants realize . . . the laws of song’s prosody as a way of keeping company with each other.” This lyric community models a resistance to tyranny by imagining, in prosody itself, an order that “binds gods and men alike” (p. 63). <em>Erectheus</em> develops this project through its incorporation of odic form, making the interplay of strophe, antistrophe, and epode into a kind of conversation. In doing so, the play brings into community heroic characters, choral populace, and the readers themselves. These songs represent a shared effort at voicing human freedom in “a world of hostile forces” and tyrannical power (p. 69). Yet ","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":"138817829","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":"Dante Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism, and the Morris Circle","authors":"Florence Boos","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915659","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 --> Dante Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism, and the Morris Circle <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Florence Boos (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Dante G. Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism</h2> <p>The year 2022 was a banner year for articles placing Dante Rossetti’s poetry in relation to the sister arts of music and painting. Several of these have been conveniently gathered in a special issue of the <em>Journal of Victorian Culture</em> (27, no. 2 [2022]), with an introduction by Michael Allis. In his “Roundtable: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Music: Introduction,” Allis lists more than a dozen settings of Rossetti’s poems by composers from 1893 to 1928, including Claude Debussy’s <em>La damoiselle élue</em>, Wilberfoss Owst’s “The White Ship,” and Vaughan Williams’s song sequence <em>The House of Life</em>. He argues that musical imagery is pervasive throughout Rossetti’s art and poetry, as critics have identified its lack of temporality and heightened sensuality with late-century aestheticism, noted the presence of exotic instruments throughout his paintings, and identified the sonorous repetitions of his lines and phrases as inherently musical. Observing that Rossetti’s oeuvre, and music itself, is inherently interdisciplinary, Allis concludes with the hope that an understanding of the musical aspects of Rossetti’s practice will further the exploration of music’s contribution to “the rich interdisciplinary potential of Victorian studies in general” (p. 186).</p> <p>The succeeding articles confirm this promise. In “Blessed Damozel(s): Ekphrastic Perspectives on Rossetti’s Poem and Painting,” George Kennasay suggests that although many artistic works of the past depict music, “the traffic is not equal” (p. 187), and fewer poems are represented in graphic art or, until the twentieth century, have inspired paintings also interpreted in music. After reviewing the title poem’s revision history (there were four versions) and contemporary reception, he notes artistic renderings by Edward Burne-Jones and Byam Shaw (Kennasay describes the latter’s 1906 illustrations as “both gaudy and banal,” p. 190), then explores Rossetti’s two paintings of the subject in 1877 and 1881 (the latter still in process shortly before his death). Both paintings thus belong to a later phase of Pre-Raphaelite art, “placing more emphasis on imagined ideas than on naturalism—an aesthetic that shades into symbolism” (p. 191); moreover, the poem’s use of concrete detail in a context of unstructured space and temporal ambiguity is a poetic equivalent of “the clear <strong>[End Page 389]</strong> physical detail of the painting . . . combined with its relative lack of perspective” (p. 192).</p> <p>At this point Kennasay turns to the many musical settings of the poem, ranging from the now-lost 1886 score of Orton Bradley and Claude Debussy’s still-performed 1888 <em>La damoiselle èlue</em> t","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138817709","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":"Victorian Women Poets","authors":"Heather Bozant Witcher","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915662","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 Poets <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Heather Bozant Witcher (bio) </li> </ul> <p>What does it mean to read, analyze, and interpret poetry at varying scales? In 2018, Natalie Houston showed how humanities research problematizes questions of scale and noted that “[f]or Victorian studies, the problems of innumerable things and how to interpret them manifest doubly as a historical phenomenon and a contemporary methodological challenge” (<em>Victorian Literature and Culture</em> 46, no. 3–4 (2018): 848–851, p. 848). Then, Houston argued that the digital invigorated our engagement with scale; now, in 2022, scholarship demonstrates that calls to “undiscipline” the field has revitalized conceptions of poetic scale and influence in the realm of women poets. This has meant more than simply considering global connections and bringing peripheral voices to the center. It has for studies of Victorian women poets meant asking new questions about familiar concepts, like the Poetess and lyric, to embrace new visions of poetry as social, multiple, and radical.</p> <p>Looking backward, Elizabeth Helsinger’s latest monograph, <em>Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth Century English Verse</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022) considers the rich inheritance of late eighteenth-century verse conversation upon Victorian forms to trace a different view of lyric history that incorporates the public, social world and a desire for reciprocity. In doing so, Helsinger also provocatively questions the implications for conversation in a twenty-first-century world marred by a global pandemic and growing political distrust. In the poems analyzed, conversations are events: either an event referred to within the poem or as a readerly experience. Helsinger thus contributes to the growing body of scholarship viewing poetry as a “social, and sociable, form” (p. 7). Although the majority of poets explored by Helsinger are canonically male (Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert Browning, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, among others), two chapters explore the conversational poetry of Christina Rossetti and Michael Field. Exploring the ekphrastic poetry of Michael Field, Helsinger interrogates the <strong>[End Page 417]</strong> encounter with visual art and “commodity relations” to repersonalize objects into something like conversation. Examining Rossetti’s ballads, Helsinger foregrounds Rossetti’s reworking of the eighteenth-century ballad tradition and its reliance on conversation. Rossetti’s spiritual dialogues imagine conversations that are at once promising and spiritually fulfilling: the anticipatory voice of God responds in the circular repetition of reciprocative poetic forms. Helsinger’s thoughtful close prosodic readings of these women poets offers new interpretations for situating Victorian poetry within a sociab","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138821619","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":"Going Back and Going On: The Uses of Re-encounter","authors":"Dominique Gracia, Fergus McGhee","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a907676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a907676","url":null,"abstract":"Going Back and Going On: The Uses of Re-encounter Dominique Gracia (bio) and Fergus McGhee (bio) The world,” wrote Robert Browning, “is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned.”1 Browning’s words insist on the enduring interest of the disowned objects of our encounters, but they also hint at the value of re- encounter itself: in his “Essay on Shelley” (1852), he urges his readers to repeated engagement with a world which— forlornly, conceitedly, at any rate unimaginatively— they think they know all too well. Browning’s point has lost nothing of its force to the passage of time, but it is still worth wondering why a Victorian audience in particular needed to hear it, and why it should have been a poet that made it. One of the things that distinguishes re- encounter from other varieties of repetition is its grounding in first- person experience, and hence its self- conscious temporal relation to past and prospective engagements with the same object: be it a person, place, thing, idea, or (as Browning’s metaphor suggests) a text. As such it may carry significant ethical implications, which might involve coming to see the world (and its constituents) as neither fully knowable nor casually disposable, and one’s own experience as vitally provisional. A re- encounter, to borrow a suggestive pairing of Stanley Cavell’s, is a way of both going back and going on.2 As the essays that follow reveal, there are many possible moods, styles, and methods of re- encounter. This special issue explores both how re- encounters are represented in Victorian poems and how structures of re- encounter shape the composition and reception of poetry in the period— through the dynamics of literary influence, the translation of earlier texts, the revision of manuscripts, and the creative reconstruction of tropes, myths, and images. Unsurprisingly, then, our chosen term often brushes up against others that bear certain family resemblances, including: representation, remediation, refashioning, recounting, revising, revisiting, revisioning, and recursion.3 Such attention lends weight to Rita Felski’s recent observation that “we shortchange the significance of art by focusing on the ‘de’ prefix (its power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the ‘re’ prefix: its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception.” 4 Our contributors offer us many different routes into the concept of re- encounter as a resource for thinking about [End Page 133] Victorian poetry and culture. While we have not been prescriptive about its definition, we nonetheless want to make a case for carefully scrutinizing our critical terms: all the following essays think hard about what makes “re- encounter” distinctive, as a structure of experience and as a critical idiom. An example from one of the most well- known poems of the period gives a sense of the stakes and possibilities. Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) pursues a re- encounter with a","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135142628","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":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a907683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a907683","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135142622","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":"On Peacocks: Feathered Re-encounters in the 1890s","authors":"Mark Llewellyn","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a907681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a907681","url":null,"abstract":"On Peacocks: Feathered Re-encounters in the 1890s Mark Llewellyn (bio) Introduction: Devouring the Bird In January 1914, a group of modernists, including William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, ate a peacock at an honorary dinner for the Victorian poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt. As recounted in Lucy McDiarmid’s Poets & the Peacock Dinner (2014), this feast represented an important moment in poetic history on the cusp of the First World War, although, as McDiarmid explores, there was some confusion and miscommunication between the generations of poets at the feast.1 The peacock as an influence in need of killing off, either via eating or other forms of cultural consumption, also inflects a novel almost contemporaneous with the peacock dinner: D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock (1911). More explicitly than the dinner for Blunt, Lawrence’s novel utilizes imagery, poetics, and visual culture from the Victorian period, specifically the 1890s and the work of Aubrey Beardsley, to slay various traditional attitudes about the role of art and to argue for a more fluid interpretation of gender and sexuality. Despite the title of Lawrence’s novel, relatively little attention has been paid to its allusion to earlier authors. Nor has much attention been paid to the gendered ambiguity of the peacock, yet, as Kristin Morrison describes it, “[t]he problematic element” is “not the peacock itself— a traditional symbol of vanity— but its female association and its whiteness.”2 Although Morrison’s essay draws on Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) and Beardsley’s illustrations for the play (1894) to account for both the femininity and the whiteness in Lawrence’s title, there is no attempt to uncover the sources or motifs of Wilde’s own white peacock. Indeed, in the reliance on the Beardsley illustrations, one can overlook the significance of that white peacock in Wilde’s work and the decadent period more broadly. While Lawrence’s text is indebted to how Wilde and Beardsley “establish[ed] the white-peacock-woman as decadent, possessive, and deadly” and the “sexual ambiguity” in Wilde’s drama, this leads to a question about where Wilde himself encountered the figure of the white peacock, the role it plays in his own work, and what that source might tell us about Wilde’s own revisioning of an earlier poetic motif (Morrison, pp. 247, 242). [End Page 225] This essay is therefore concerned not with the legacy of a particular dinner in 1914 or Lawrence’s revisioning of the 1890s but rather with looking backward from that early twentieth-century moment of literal and meta phorical peacock slaying to the poetry and culture of the fin de siècle in order to understand a longer chain of re-encounter. Specifically, my concern is with the ways in which the decadent poets of the 1880s and 1890s used the peacock motif to re-envision Victorian poetic tropes of the midcentury. The approach here, then, stages multiple sites of re-encounter, tracing a lineage from the peacocks of the 1840s–1870s in the","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135142626","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":"Christ Among the Decadents: Re-encountering Religion in Edwin Arnold’s The Light of the World","authors":"Joshua Brorby","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a907677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a907677","url":null,"abstract":"Christ Among the Decadents: Re-encountering Religion in Edwin Arnold’s The Light of the World Joshua Brorby (bio) In 1879, Edwin Arnold completed the poem that would make him famous, his epic life of Gau ta ma Bud dha, The Light of Asia. Published in over thirty editions in the first six years of its existence, Arnold’s bestseller constitutes a model entry in two related Victorian genres: the orientalist free translation and the comparative religious primer.1 The former genre has as its most well-known representative The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1888) by Richard Francis Burton, while the latter reached its apogee with F. Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East (1879–1910). Both genres represent a re-encounter on the part of the author with an extant text in a foreign language, but for the audience they were often original reading experiences. Arnold, too, made his name by introducing unfamiliar religious traditions to English readers: in addition to epicizing the life of Buddha in The Light of Asia (1879), he enumerated the names of Allah in Pearls of the Faith (1883) and translated the Bhagavad Gita in his The Song Celestial (1885). The same cannot be said of the epic life of Christ he produced in 1891.2 Given that its readers might be expected to “know what is in the book before they open it,” as one reviewer put it at the time, The Light of the World was seen by Arnold’s contemporaries as a “missed . . . opportunity”; as Christopher Clausen has observed, it “fell dead from the press.”3 The work’s failure had to do with the fact that the epic did not adhere to either of the generic types with which Arnold had made his name, offering neither a fresh translation nor instruction in unfamiliar religious doctrine. It dwelled on the story Victorian readers knew better than any other, and in that spirit, it belongs decidedly to the realm of re-encounter. Critically reading Arnold’s epic of Christ with mid-Victorian religious controversies in mind might confirm now axiomatic observations about the period’s literary-religious culture: that it was populated by writers reimagining [End Page 143] the life of Christ for a readership acquainted with German higher criticism and Ernest Renan, the French scholar whose Vie de Jésus (1863) expunged biblical miracles to depict Christ as a historical figure.4 Likewise, reading for the specifically Buddhist presence in The Light of the World would reinforce convincing arguments identifying the Gautama Buddha as a crucial Victorian analog, and forerunner, of Christ.5 If encountered, however, alongside the emerging decadents rising to prominence as the star of Tennyson and his generation waned, The Light of the World is a much more interesting flop— one that attempts to reconcile its earnest comparative religious perspective with the hallmarks of a poetics that imagined the modern in decay. Exploring in Arnold’s “signal failure” the border between worlds seen and unseen, finite and infinite, shows how th","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135142621","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}