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This essay places Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House in the context of Victorian explorations of the act of thinking about a beloved other. It centers on two short \"Preludes\" from the poem--\"The Kiss\" and \"Love Thinking\"-- which raise questions about the relationship of love to knowledge. Reading Patmore's poem in this way makes it possible to recognize \"The Kiss\" as the crucial source for a much more serious poem about thinking, kissing, and sleeping: George Meredith's Modern Love. Through its relation to Meredith's poem and to other texts, as well as to Patmore's theory of poetic meter, \"The Kiss\" opens onto serious concerns about whether thinking about the one you love is constitutive of--or destructive to--intimacy.

Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, \"English meter\" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline.The Rise and Fall of Metertells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.

Fontana argues that Patmore shortly before and after his conversion to Catholicism grapples with the legacy of the great Jansenist Catholic writer, Blaise Pascal. Fontana's intention is to place Patmore within the context of a Catholic literary tradition.

Though often defined as having opposite aims, means, and effects, modernism and modern propaganda developed at the same time and influenced each other in surprising ways. The professional propagandist emerged as one kind of information specialist, the modernist writer as another. Britain was particularly important to this double history. By secretly hiring well-known writers and intellectuals to write for the government and by exploiting their control of new global information systems, the British in World War I invented a new template for the manipulation of information that remains with us to this day. Making a persuasive case for the importance of understanding modernism in the context of the history of modern propaganda, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda also helps explain the origins of today's highly propagandized world. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda integrates new archival research with fresh interpretations of British fiction and film to provide a comprehensive cultural history of the relationship between modernism and propaganda in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. From works by Joseph Conrad to propaganda films by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Mark Wollaeger traces the transition from literary to cinematic propaganda while offering compelling close readings of major fiction by Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce.

In The Afterlife of Property, Jeff Nunokawa investigates the conviction passed on by the Victorian novel that a woman's love is the only fortune a man can count on to last. Taking for his example four texts, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner, Nunokawa studies the diverse ways that the Victorian novel imagines women as property removed from the uncertainties of the marketplace. Along the way, he notices how the categories of economics, gender, sexuality, race, and fiction define one another in the Victorian novel. If the novel figures women as safe property, Nunokawa argues, the novel figures safe property as a woman. And if the novel identifies the angel of the house, the desexualized subject of Victorian fantasies of ideal womanhood, as safe property, it identifies various types of fiction, illicit sexualities, and foreign races with the enemy of such property: the commodity form. Nunokawa shows how these convergences of fiction, sexuality, and race with the commodity form are part of a scapegoat scenario, in which the otherwise ubiquitous instabilities of the marketplace can be contained and expunged, clearing the way for secure possession. The Afterlife of Property addresses literary and cultural theory, gender studies, and gay and lesbian studies.

(1823–96), published his first volume, Poems, in 1844. His work was much admired by the Pre‐Raphaelites

Emily Dickinson and her sister Susan read with interest Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House. Susan even quoted lines from it in her obituary for Dickinson. Many of Dickinson's poems, in which the speaker is a newlywed bride are attempts to fill the lacuna of Patmore's verse novel in which the point of view is exclusively that of the groom. Dickinson also inventively responds to some of Patmore's metaphoric allusions, e.g. to cochineal and to Franklin's lost Arctic expedition. Among the poems treated are several of Dickinson's wife as well as several of her Arctic poems.

Tate focuses on the fitness of Alfred Tennyson toward being the poet laureate, the publication of the poem, In Memoriam and the laureateship.Here, Tate states that the publication of the poem certainly improved Tennyson's literary reputation and raised his public profile, but it did not instantaneously transform him into a representative national figure. However, the claims of certain contemporary reviewers that it did just that have been too eagerly embraced by later critics. Tennyson's appointment as Poet Laureate, supposedly the confirmation of his status as national icon, seems to have been more a matter of contingency and personal preference than of an inevitable yielding to cultural forces and popular opinion and adds that it is essential that the complexities of these issues are incorporated into any assessment of the reception of In Memoriam and of its effect on Tennyson's reputation during what can si ill be seen as his annus mirabilis.

What is the meaning of a word? Most readers turn to the dictionary for authoritative meanings and correct usage. But what is the source of authority in dictionaries? Some dictionaries employ panels of experts to fix meaning and prescribe usage, others rely on derivation through etymology. But perhaps no other dictionary has done more to standardize the English language than the formidable twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary in its 1989 second edition. Yet this most Victorian of modern dictionaries derives its meaning by citing the earliest known usage of words and by demonstrating shades of meaning through an awesome database of over five million examples of usage in context. In this fascinating study, John Willinsky challenges the authority of this imperial dictionary, revealing many of its inherent prejudices and questioning the assumptions of its ongoing revision. \"Clearly, the OED is no simple record of the language `as she is spoke,'\" Willinsky writes. \"It is a selective representation reflecting certain elusive ideas about the nature of the English language and people. Empire of Words reveals, by statistic and table, incident and anecdote, how serendipitous, judgmental, and telling a task editing a dictionary such as the OED can be.\"

The poem he is most remembered for is 'The Toys'. Yes, the things children play with. This is a marvellous poem which careers along on the edge of sentiment but miraculously avoids it, and comes out at full speed.