Poetic hospitality: dramatic monologue as a neo-Victorian, post-modern genre

ABSTRACT The ever-increasing contemporary interest in the Victorian Age is testified to by a growing number of works engaging with the re-reading, re-writing, and revising of the long nineteenth century. This interest parallels a tendency to identify the Victorian literary tradition solely with the novel. By contrast, this essay focuses on Victorian and neo-Victorian poetry, arguing that issues of otherness/identity, and empathy/hostility are at the heart of Victorian poetic predicaments. Victorian models and themes are exploited by contemporary poets in order to deal with anxieties about local/global experiences, collective/individual identities, and host/guest interactions. Drawing on Rachel Hollander’s definition of narrative hospitality, this essay proposes a definition of ‘poetic hospitality’ that takes the specific features of the poetic text into account, and focuseson poetry as a heteroglossic discourse. The dramatic monologue, is analysed as a privileged site for exploring neo-Victorian hospitality. This kind of poetic composition is generally written in a form that suggests a speech made by an individual character. In dramatic monologues, what appears to be a single voice is usually a composite one, signifying more than one identity amongst the speakers. The analyses of poems by A.S. Byatt, C.A. Duffy and Margaret show how dramatic monologues in neo-Victorian poetry may mobilise historical memory in order to allow new narratives to emerge.