Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
5,879
result(s) for
"Victorian Poetry"
Sort by:
Surprised by Hope: Possibilities of Spiritual Experience in Victorian Lyric Poetry
This article reconsiders literature’s capacity to express and evoke spiritual experiences by turning to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, especially his discussion of mysticism and his suggestion that poetry can bring about such states. James’s ideas are especially promising given recent developments in postsecular and postcritical scholarship that problematize a religious/secular divide and call into question a hermeneutics of suspicion. Bringing James into conversation with Paul Ricoeur, I aim to show how receptivity to spiritual experiences in literature might generate expansive models of both poetics and hermeneutics. To pursue these possibilities, my study analyzes three examples of Victorian lyric poems that probe the edges of wonder: Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush”, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Nondum” and Dollie Radford’s “A Dream of ‘Dreams’”. These case studies strategically select work by writers of various belief or unbelief positions, highlighting the dynamism of the late nineteenth-century moment from which James’s writings emerged. I argue that this poetry facilitates a re-imagination of hope, beyond a faith/doubt dichotomy, as well as a re-framing of revelation, from proclamation to invitation. Building on insights from both James and Ricoeur, my discussion concludes by making the case for cultivating an interpretive disposition that does not guard against but opens toward poetry’s latent potential to take readers by surprise.
Journal Article
Poetry, pictures, and popular publishing : the illustrated gift book and Victorian visual culture, 1855-1875
\"In Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing eminent Rossetti scholar Lorraine Janzen Kooistra demonstrates the cultural centrality of a neglected artifact: the Victorian illustrated gift book. Turning a critical lens on \"drawing-room books\" as both material objects and historical events, Kooistra reveals how the gift book's visual/verbal form mediated \"high\" and popular art as well as book and periodical publication. A composite text produced by many makers, the poetic gift book was designed for domestic space and a female audience; its mode of publication marks a significant moment in the history of authorship, reading, and publishing. With rigorous attention to the gift book's aesthetic and ideological features, Kooistra analyzes the contributions of poets, artists, engravers, publishers, and readers and shows how its material form moved poetry into popular culture. Drawing on archival and periodical research, she offers new readings of Eliza Cook, Adelaide Procter, and Jean Ingelow and shows the transatlantic reach of their verses. Boldly re-situating Tennyson's works within the gift-book economy he dominated, Kooistra demonstrates how the conditions of corporate authorship shaped the production and reception of the laureate's verses at the peak of his popularity. Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing changes the map of poetry's place--in all its senses--in Victorian everyday life and consumer culture\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
“Life whetted upon life”: Mathilde Blind, The Ascent of Man, and the Geological Record
This article investigates the wealth of geological detail across Mathilde Blind’s poetry, especially The Ascent of Man (1889). Considering the influences of, among others, James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin on Blind’s political and poetic thinking, the article argues that she contrasts the cyclical nature of geological time with human time, which has the potential to be linear and ascendant. For Blind, intervention in the geological scheme is the cosmic destiny and responsibility of humankind. Her focus on images and themes of shaping, molding, and forming, dynamically associating tectonic action and human labor with a metaphor for evolution as a process of erosion or honing, links her scientific interests to her political consciousness. The article suggests that Blind’s pinnacle of human ethical achievement correlates with that of Marx and Engels on the Communist ending of history, while also discussing how Blind’s political consciousness diverges from the Marxist. For Blind, this focus on hierarchy and the responsibility of humanity for the world betrays an anthropocentrism that is strikingly Victorian. However, the poem’s socialist and feminist argument culminates in an ethical recalibration of the human-world relationship.
Journal Article
Corporeal Abjection and Hopefulness in Oscar Wilde’s “Charmides” (1881)
This paper addresses the potential relationship between corporality, abjection, and hope in Oscar Wilde’s “Charmides” (1881). The main aim of inspecting this connection is to establish how Wilde makes use of abjection in order to defend the idea that sexual dissidence can, indeed, offer the possibility of hope. In other words, the paper focuses on how Wilde describes abject bodies and abject bodily acts in the poem in a way that ultimately defies the social and moral conventions of his period. It argues that acts that may be considered abject –such as same-sex desire– can be hopeful when addressed from a different perspective. This paper hopes to establish a clear connection between the poem, the abject, and Wilde’s defiance of the sexual mores of his period.
Journal Article
Morris the Skald: Icelandic Translation as Social Liberation
Between 1869 and 1895, William Morris published with his co-translator Eiríkr Magnússon eight volumes of Icelandic translations. Morris's approach to Icelandic translation embodied a form of radical, empowering identification, which moderated over time into a belief that certain aspects of Icelandic culture could provide models for an alternate, less materialistic future society. Morris expressed his intense engagement with the sagas in a series of poems, in which he responded in starkly personal terms to the Icelandic literary past. In addition, Morris inscribed several of his writings in calligraphic manuscripts, merging his skaldic persona, calligraphic renditions, original poetry, and autobiographical expressions. His grasp of the significance of medieval linguistic forms, coupled with a belief in their ability to generate new meanings, anticipated his later view that aspects of a reimagined Icelandic culture provided a salutary antidote to the \"infallible maxims\" of Victorian industrial capitalism. Morris's immersion in the Icelandic sagas thus provided a form of creative estrangement on several fronts, as he responded variously to the Old Norse tales as imagined skald, time traveler, creative historicist, translator, linguistic wordsmith, critic, poet, and social theorist.
Journal Article
Dramatic Autobiography: the Poetic Voice Recreating Itself in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Bride’s Prelude
The dramatic monologue is one of the most important of the new Victorian poetic forms, and was designed to decipher the soul and probe into it, with the objective, to quote Browning’s dedication to John Milsand in his poem ‘Sordello’, to lay stress on ‘the incidents in the developments of the soul’. As such, this poetic form helps recreate a life, through the fictitious reality of the poetic voice: by talking about itself and primarily to itself, the poetic persona of the dramatic monologue builds up an imaginary autobiography. Some of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poems which can qualify as dramatic monologues use this fictitious autobiography to give a voice to marginalized populations, for instance ‘The Bride’s Prelude’. This poem presents a woman about to be forcefully married to a man who deceived her and abandoned her, as she explains to her sister why she cannot look forward to this marriage. Her explanation of what happened constitutes a dramatic autobiography, or an autobiographical monologue: a genre at the crossroads between autobiography and dramatic monologue, in which a voice which is rarely heard is given the opportunity to tell its own version of the story. This recreation of a life story gives the artist the opportunity not only to paint a vivid picture of a time long gone, but to question mechanisms of power in a way that might resonate in Victorian times. For an author such as Rossetti, who stayed clear of politics most of his life, fake autobiographies might be seen as a way to engage with contemporary issues, through the prism of someone else’s life and borrowed autobiographical voices.
Journal Article
Critical Rhythm
Rhythm constitutes an untapped resource for understanding poetry, making legible a range of ways poetry affects us that cannot be parsed through the traditional resources of poetic theory.Rhythm has rich but also problematic roots in nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, and sometimes racialized poetics. But there are reasons to understand and even embrace its seductions, including its resistance to lyrical voice and even identity. Pressing beyond poetry handbooks' isolated descriptions of technique, the book asks what it means to think rhythm.
eBook
A. Mary F. Robinson
Born in England in 1857, Agnes Mary Frances Robinson contributed
to cultural and literary currents from nineteenth-century
Victorianism to twentieth-century modernism; she was equally at
home in London and Paris and prolific in both English and French.
Yet Robinson remains an enigma on many levels. This literary
biography integrates Robinson's unorthodox life with her
development as a writer across genres. Best known for her poetry,
Robinson was also a respected biographer, history writer, travel
writer, and contributor of reviews and articles to the Times
Literary Supplement for nearly forty years. She had a romantic
friendship with the writer Vernon Lee and two happy - and celibate
- marriages. Her salons in London and Paris were attended by major
literary and artistic figures, and she counted amongst her friends
Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds, Gaston Paris,
Ernest Renan, and Maurice Barrès. Reflecting a decade of research
in international archives and family papers, A. Mary F.
Robinson reveals the extraordinary woman behind the popular
writer and critically acclaimed poet.
eBook
