Dramatic Monologue

634 Pages·2008·2.98 MB·English

A C O M P A N I O N T O
V
ICTORIAN
P
OETRY
EDITED BY RICHARD CRONIN,
ALISON CHAPMAN AND
ANTONY H. HARRISON

A Companion to Victorian Poetry
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A C O M P A N I O N T O
V
ICTORIAN
P
OETRY
EDITED BY RICHARD CRONIN,
ALISON CHAPMAN AND
ANTONY H. HARRISON
© 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd
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First published 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd
First published in paperback 2007 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd
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Contents
Editors’ Preface viii
Notes on Contributors x
Chronology xv
Introduction: Victorian Poetics
Carol T. Christ 1
PART ONE Varieties and Forms 23
1 Epic
Herbert F. Tucker 25
2 Domestic and Idyllic
Linda H. Peterson 42
3 Lyric
Matthew Rowlinson 59
4 Dramatic Monologue
E. Warwick Slinn 80
5 Sonnet and Sonnet Sequence
Alison Chapman 99
6 Elegy
Seamus Perry 115
7 Hymn
J. R. Watson 134
vi Contents
8 Nonsense
Roderick McGillis 155
9 Verse Novel
Dino Felluga 171
10 Verse Drama
Adrienne Scullion 187
11 Working-Class Poetry
Florence Boos 204
12 The Classical Tradition
Richard Jenkyns 229
13 Arthurian Poetry and Medievalism
Antony H. Harrison 246
14 Poetry in Translation
J.-A. George 262
15 Tractarian Poetry
Stephen Prickett 279
16 The Spasmodics
Richard Cronin 291
17 The Pre-Raphaelite School
David Riede 305
18 The Poetry of the 1890s
Chris Snodgrass 321
PART TWO Production, Distribution and Reception 343
19 The Market
Lee Erickson 345
20 Anthologies and the Making of the Poetic Canon
Natalie M. Houston 361
21 Reviewing
Joanne Shattock 378
Contents vii
22 Poetry and Illustration
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra 392
PART THREE Victorian Poetry and Victorian Culture 419
23 Nationhood and Empire
Margaret Linley 421
24 Poetry in the Four Nations
Matthew Campbell 438
25 Poetry and Religion
W. David Shaw 457
26 Poetry and Science
Alan Rauch 475
27 Landscape and Cityscape
Pauline Fletcher 493
28 Vision and Visuality
Catherine Maxwell 510
29 Marriage and Gender
Julia F. Saville 526
30 Sexuality and Love
John Maynard 543
Index 567
Editors’ Preface
In England, the period from about 1830 until World War I is normally distinguished by
historians as ‘Victorian’ in honour of the longest-reigning monarch in British history, who
dominated the era as a kind of cultural icon. These years witnessed an extraordinary flow-
ering of literary culture, comparable in many respects to what occurred under England’s
other long-lived and remarkably influential female monarch, Queen Elizabeth I. Despite
the virtual absence of significant drama produced for the stage during most of the Victo-
rian era, every other genre flourished. (Much great dramatic literature did in fact emerge,
but not in the form of stage plays.) The productivity of poets, novelists and writers of
self-consciously artistic prose non-fiction remains, from the vantage of the early twenty-
first century, breathtaking.
The work of the poets, on whom this volume focuses, retains its ability to enchant,
amaze and inspire. Victorian poetry, as a vast and extraordinarily complex body of pro-
ductions, employs every established verse form in the language and exploits every estab-
lished poetic subgenre, while refining upon some, such as the dramatic monologue, the
verse drama and the pastoral elegy, in ways previously unimagined. Produced by authors
of both sexes in every social class from all districts in the British Isles (and indeed the
colonies), it engages a remarkable variety of cultural discourses – political, religious, social,
economic and scientific – in both direct and nuanced ways that still strike readers as highly
original, and also aesthetically and ideologically powerful. Coming to critical terms with
this diverse body of materials is a project that in itself raises many critical and theoreti-
cal issues, issues that the editors of this Companion have attempted to address openly in
both the content of its chapters and its organizing principles.
Readers of this volume will immediately notice its differences from some of the other
Blackwell Companions, as well from other works that attempt in some way to present a
critical or historical introduction to Victorian poetry. Instead of collecting essays that treat
significant Victorian poets or poems individually, we have brought together specially com-
missioned chapters that reflect both the multifariousness of Victorian poetry and the
variety of critical approaches to it – many of them richly informed by recent develop-
ments in textual and cultural theory. Thus, rather than presenting a single chapter on
Idylls of the King, we provide readers with a number of chapters in which Tennyson’s great