<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Keeping Faith in Victorian Poetry <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Erik Gray (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>I</strong> felt honored to be one of the young scholars invited in 2003 to contribute to the special issue of this journal, “Whither Victorian Poetry?” on the current and future state of the field. Taking its title from Tennyson, my essay, “A Bounded Field: Situating Victorian Poetry in the Literary Landscape,” argued that studies of Victorian poetry tended to look inward rather than reaching across temporal, geographic, and generic boundaries. Focusing on the surge of interest in female Victorian poets that had begun about fifteen years earlier, I noted the critical tendency to consider those poets primarily either in isolation or in relationship to each other, and I urged the importance of studying them in relation to a more expansive context. Unable to resist another pun on “field,” I chose to illustrate my point using Michael Field’s “The Sleeping Venus” (1892). Field’s poem describes a 1510 painting by Giorgione that depicts the nude Venus reclining full-length in an idealized landscape. The poets describe the figure’s posture, not unreasonably, as suggesting an act of autoeroticism. But they also emphasize the way the central figure echoes and participates in the interplay of shapes and lines of the broader landscape in which she appears. The point of my reading, explicitly, was to take the figure of Venus as a symbol for Victorian poetry: we should not become so fascinated with our field and its internal relations, I argued, that we ignore its relation to a wider context; rather we should follow the example of Michael Field and try to see the whole picture. Implicitly, though, my argument seemed to offer Venus as a symbol of the <em>critic</em> of Victorian poetry. <em>Do you see this figure</em> (I said, in essence, to my colleagues)—<em>somnolent, oblivious, self-pleasuring? That’s you</em>.</p> <p>Rereading the essay now for the first time in twenty years, I am surprised by a few things. I’m surprised at my presumptuousness. I’m a little surprised that I have continued to have a career in this field and even to be welcomed within it. Even so, I stand by what I wrote. It’s always a safe <strong>[End Page 437]</strong> bet, of course, to call for breadth and inclusiveness rather than narrowness and strictly defined boundaries—nothing remarkable there. But what strikes me in retrospect is how my plea for expanding our field of vision prefigured, however faintly, the two most significant calls to action to have appeared in Victorian studies since that time (both of them, as it happens, jointly authored): the Manifesto of the V21 Collective (2015) and “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (2020), by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong, which introduced a special issue of <em>Victorian Studies</
{"title":"Keeping Faith in Victorian Poetry","authors":"Erik Gray","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933696","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 --> Keeping Faith in Victorian Poetry <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Erik Gray (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>I</strong> felt honored to be one of the young scholars invited in 2003 to contribute to the special issue of this journal, “Whither Victorian Poetry?” on the current and future state of the field. Taking its title from Tennyson, my essay, “A Bounded Field: Situating Victorian Poetry in the Literary Landscape,” argued that studies of Victorian poetry tended to look inward rather than reaching across temporal, geographic, and generic boundaries. Focusing on the surge of interest in female Victorian poets that had begun about fifteen years earlier, I noted the critical tendency to consider those poets primarily either in isolation or in relationship to each other, and I urged the importance of studying them in relation to a more expansive context. Unable to resist another pun on “field,” I chose to illustrate my point using Michael Field’s “The Sleeping Venus” (1892). Field’s poem describes a 1510 painting by Giorgione that depicts the nude Venus reclining full-length in an idealized landscape. The poets describe the figure’s posture, not unreasonably, as suggesting an act of autoeroticism. But they also emphasize the way the central figure echoes and participates in the interplay of shapes and lines of the broader landscape in which she appears. The point of my reading, explicitly, was to take the figure of Venus as a symbol for Victorian poetry: we should not become so fascinated with our field and its internal relations, I argued, that we ignore its relation to a wider context; rather we should follow the example of Michael Field and try to see the whole picture. Implicitly, though, my argument seemed to offer Venus as a symbol of the <em>critic</em> of Victorian poetry. <em>Do you see this figure</em> (I said, in essence, to my colleagues)—<em>somnolent, oblivious, self-pleasuring? That’s you</em>.</p> <p>Rereading the essay now for the first time in twenty years, I am surprised by a few things. I’m surprised at my presumptuousness. I’m a little surprised that I have continued to have a career in this field and even to be welcomed within it. Even so, I stand by what I wrote. It’s always a safe <strong>[End Page 437]</strong> bet, of course, to call for breadth and inclusiveness rather than narrowness and strictly defined boundaries—nothing remarkable there. But what strikes me in retrospect is how my plea for expanding our field of vision prefigured, however faintly, the two most significant calls to action to have appeared in Victorian studies since that time (both of them, as it happens, jointly authored): the Manifesto of the V21 Collective (2015) and “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (2020), by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong, which introduced a special issue of <em>Victorian Studies</","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"67 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774748","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}
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Contributors <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p>L<small>ee</small> B<small>ehlman</small> (behlmanl@montclair.edu) is a Professor of English at Montclair State University. He co-edited the collections <em>Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life</em> (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) with Olivia Loksing Moy, and <em>Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates</em> (Routledge, 2016) with Anne Long-muir. He has published articles on Victorian light verse, motherhood, and nineteenth-century classicism in journals such as <em>Victorian Poetry</em>, <em>Journal of Victorian Culture</em>, and <em>Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies</em>.</p> <p>E<small>rik</small> G<small>ray</small> (eg2155@columbia.edu) is a Professor of English at Columbia University, and is the author of <em>The Poetry of Indifference</em> (2005), <em>Milton and the Victorians</em> (2009), and <em>The Art of Love Poetry</em> (2018). He is currently co-editing a new anthology of Victorian poetry, forthcoming from Broadview Press.</p> <p>H<small>elen</small> G<small>roth</small> (h.groth@unsw.edu.au) is a Professor of Literary Studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of <em>Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia</em> (Oxford, 2003) and <em>Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices</em> (Edinburgh, 2013), and co-author of a third monograph (with Natalya Lusty), <em>Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History</em> (Routledge, 2013). She is the co-editor of a number of collections, including <em>Writing the Global Riot: Literature in a Time of Crisis</em> (Oxford, 2023) and <em>The Edinburgh Companion of Literature and Sound Studies</em> (Edinburgh, 2024).</p> <p>L<small>inda</small> K. H<small>ughes</small> (L.Hughes@tcu.edu) is the Addie Levy Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University, and specializes in historical media, gender and women’s studies, and transnationality, including transatlanticism. She most recently co-edited, with Phyllis Weliver, the special issue of <em>Victorian Poetry</em> focused on poetry and salon culture (60, no. 2, 2022). Her monograph <em>Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity</em> (Cambridge, 2022) features ten progressive women writers’ active cultural exchanges with Germans and Germany and includes attention to poems by Anna Jameson, Mary Howitt, Michael Field, and Amy Levy. Linda is also coeditor, with Sarah R. Robbins and Andrew Taylor, of <em>Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776–1920: An Anthology</em> (Edinburgh, 2022), organized around ten themes ranging from abolition and its aftermaths to suffrage and citizenship, and art, aesthetics, and entertainments. The anthology includes poetry along with manifestos, travel writing, fiction, essays, and numerous illustrations.</p> <p>C<small>harles</small> L<small
以下是内容的简要摘录，以代替摘要： 撰稿人 Lee Behlman (behlmanl@montclair.edu) 是蒙特克莱尔州立大学的英语教授。他与人合编了《维多利亚诗集》（Victorian Verse：The Poetics of Everyday Life》（帕尔格雷夫-麦克米伦出版社，2023 年），以及《维多利亚文学》：批评与辩论》（Routledge，2016 年）。他在《维多利亚诗歌》、《维多利亚文化期刊》和《十九世纪性别研究》等期刊上发表过关于维多利亚轻诗歌、母性和十九世纪古典主义的文章。埃里克-格雷（eg2155@columbia.edu）是哥伦比亚大学英语系教授，著有《冷漠之诗》（The Poetry of Indifference，2005 年）、《弥尔顿与维多利亚时代》（Milton and the Victorians，2009 年）和《爱情诗的艺术》（The Art of Love Poetry，2018 年）。他目前正在与他人合作编辑一本新的维多利亚诗选，即将由 Broadview Press 出版。海伦-格罗斯 (h.groth@unsw.edu.au) 是澳大利亚新南威尔士大学文学研究教授。她著有《维多利亚摄影与文学怀旧》（牛津，2003 年）和《移动的图像》：十九世纪的阅读和银幕实践》（爱丁堡，2013 年），以及第三部专著《梦想与现代性》（与 Natalya Lusty 合著）的合著者：文化史》（Routledge，2013 年）。她还是多部作品集的共同编辑，包括《书写全球骚乱》（Writing the Global Riot：危机时期的文学》（牛津，2023 年）和《爱丁堡文学与声音研究指南》（爱丁堡，2024 年）。琳达-K-休斯（Linda K. Hughes）（L.Hughes@tcu.edu）是德克萨斯基督教大学Addie Levy文学教授，专攻历史媒体、性别和妇女研究以及跨国性，包括跨大西洋主义。最近，她与菲利斯-韦利弗（Phyllis Weliver）共同编辑了《维多利亚诗歌》特刊，该特刊关注诗歌和沙龙文化（2022 年第 60 期第 2 号）。她的专著《维多利亚时代的女作家与另一个德国》（Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany：她的专著《维多利亚时代女作家与另一个德国：跨文化自由与女性机会》（剑桥，2022 年）介绍了十位进步女作家与德国人和德国的积极文化交流，其中包括 Anna Jameson、Mary Howitt、Michael Field 和 Amy Levy 的诗作。琳达还与萨拉-R-罗宾斯（Sarah R. Robbins）和安德鲁-泰勒（Andrew Taylor）共同编辑了《跨大西洋英语文学，1776-1920》（Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776-1920）：选集》（爱丁堡，2022 年）围绕十个主题展开，从废奴及其后果到选举权和公民权，以及艺术、美学和娱乐。选集包括诗歌、宣言、游记、小说、散文和大量插图。查尔斯-拉波特 (laporte@uw.edu) 是华盛顿大学的英语教授。他的著作包括专著《维多利亚时代的诗人和不断变化的圣经》（弗吉尼亚州，2011 年）和《维多利亚时代对莎士比亚的崇拜》（剑桥，2021 年）。他与洛里-布兰奇（Lori Branch）共同编辑了剑桥大学出版社新出版的《1500 年以来文学与宗教要素》丛书。他的研究重点是诗歌与宗教的历史交集。Michele Martinez (mcmartin@bu.edu) 是波士顿大学文理学院写作课程的高级讲师。她的研究重点是十九世纪诗歌与视觉文化之间的交叉，目前主要研究卡梅隆家庭摄影中的帝国视觉性。2012 年，她出版了伊丽莎白-巴雷特-勃朗宁的《奥罗拉-利》：阅读指南》（爱丁堡）。她的跨学科作品曾发表在《维多利亚研究》、《维多利亚诗歌》、《维多利亚评论》和《现代语言研究》上，还出版了《维多利亚女诗人》一书。她关于 Aurora Leigh 和 Elena Ferrante 的那不勒斯小说中的委托的论文将收录在由 Simon Avery 和 Cora Kaplan 编辑的伊丽莎白-巴雷特-勃朗宁诗歌论文集中。Monique R. Morgan (mormorga@indiana.edu) 是印第安纳大学布卢明顿分校的英语副教授，也是《维多利亚研究》杂志的编辑。她的研究和教学重点是浪漫主义和维多利亚文学、叙事理论、诗学以及文学与科学。她著有《叙事的手段，抒情的目的：十九世纪英国长诗中的时间性》（俄亥俄州立大学，2009 年），近期还在《维多利亚研究》、《剑桥维多利亚女性诗歌指南》和《布莱克维尔维多利亚文学百科全书》上发表论文。她目前正在完成一部关于维多利亚时期科幻小说中的叙事学和认识论的著作。已故的 Lee O'Brien 是一位独立学者，曾任悉尼麦考瑞大学英语系高级讲师。她曾在期刊上发表过关于艾米莉...
{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933708","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933708","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 --> Contributors <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p>L<small>ee</small> B<small>ehlman</small> (behlmanl@montclair.edu) is a Professor of English at Montclair State University. He co-edited the collections <em>Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life</em> (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) with Olivia Loksing Moy, and <em>Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates</em> (Routledge, 2016) with Anne Long-muir. He has published articles on Victorian light verse, motherhood, and nineteenth-century classicism in journals such as <em>Victorian Poetry</em>, <em>Journal of Victorian Culture</em>, and <em>Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies</em>.</p> <p>E<small>rik</small> G<small>ray</small> (eg2155@columbia.edu) is a Professor of English at Columbia University, and is the author of <em>The Poetry of Indifference</em> (2005), <em>Milton and the Victorians</em> (2009), and <em>The Art of Love Poetry</em> (2018). He is currently co-editing a new anthology of Victorian poetry, forthcoming from Broadview Press.</p> <p>H<small>elen</small> G<small>roth</small> (h.groth@unsw.edu.au) is a Professor of Literary Studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of <em>Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia</em> (Oxford, 2003) and <em>Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices</em> (Edinburgh, 2013), and co-author of a third monograph (with Natalya Lusty), <em>Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History</em> (Routledge, 2013). She is the co-editor of a number of collections, including <em>Writing the Global Riot: Literature in a Time of Crisis</em> (Oxford, 2023) and <em>The Edinburgh Companion of Literature and Sound Studies</em> (Edinburgh, 2024).</p> <p>L<small>inda</small> K. H<small>ughes</small> (L.Hughes@tcu.edu) is the Addie Levy Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University, and specializes in historical media, gender and women’s studies, and transnationality, including transatlanticism. She most recently co-edited, with Phyllis Weliver, the special issue of <em>Victorian Poetry</em> focused on poetry and salon culture (60, no. 2, 2022). Her monograph <em>Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity</em> (Cambridge, 2022) features ten progressive women writers’ active cultural exchanges with Germans and Germany and includes attention to poems by Anna Jameson, Mary Howitt, Michael Field, and Amy Levy. Linda is also coeditor, with Sarah R. Robbins and Andrew Taylor, of <em>Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776–1920: An Anthology</em> (Edinburgh, 2022), organized around ten themes ranging from abolition and its aftermaths to suffrage and citizenship, and art, aesthetics, and entertainments. The anthology includes poetry along with manifestos, travel writing, fiction, essays, and numerous illustrations.</p> <p>C<small>harles</small> L<small","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774758","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}
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Whithering: <span>Or ’Tis Twenty Years Since</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Linda K. Hughes (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>I</strong> open by paying tribute to John Lamb, the outgoing editor of <em>Victorian Poetry</em>, who suggested the idea—a brilliant one—for this special issue back in 2022. The collected essays it gathers comprise a fitting capstone to his editorship of <em>Victorian Poetry</em> from 2005 to 2023.</p> <p>This afterword appends a meta-retrospect to the retrospects (as well as the forward-looking prospects) on Victorian poetry scholarship the issue’s gifted contributors offer. Rather than responding to each “Whither Redux” commentary in turn, I focus on the larger impressions and cumulative status report on the fortunes of Victorian poetry they form. One happy revelation from the special issue is that so many of the nascent scholars who contributed to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” in 2003 have since had such successful and productive careers—a heartening fact when we more often hear about blocked or merely marginal opportunities within our profession. Some “Whither Redux?” essays can even be read as a collective memoir of professional life during the past two decades, especially Jason Rudy’s, Charles LaPorte’s, and Stephanie Weiner’s accounts of how their scholarship has evolved, sometimes in markedly new ways, over the course of their now mature careers. Continuities are evident as well as change; Michele Martinez continues to pursue research in the sister arts, now within a much wider ambit, and Helen Groth again focuses on poetry and photography, in this case, an 1891 Bodley Head edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s <em>Casa Guidi Windows</em> with an introductory essay by fin-de-siécle poet A. Mary F. Robinson (by then Mme. Darmesteter). Monique Morgan, Lee O’Brien, and Stephanie Weiner helpfully provide illuminating surveys of the 2003 “Whither?” special issue, enabling readers of the current issue to gauge more comprehensively how well the new directions embraced or predicted in 2003 have been borne out by subsequent scholarship. The major lacunae in these predictions of two decades <strong>[End Page 569]</strong> ago, Monique Morgan suggests, are the anti-racist and ecocritical approaches to poetry that are now central to innovative scholarship today.</p> <p>As is to be expected, the 2023 contributors form no monolithic group, nor a monolithic consensus. Whereas some emphasize the contraction of opportunity in the humanities generally, and poetry scholarship and classroom teaching in particular, others see an expansion. Those perceiving contraction especially underscore the dramatic decline of interest among students and other department faculty in historical studies, and an even more radical decline in “depth” reading, as do Charles La Porte, Lee O’Brien, Monique Morgan, and Marion Thain. Whe
{"title":"Whithering: Or 'Tis Twenty Years Since","authors":"Linda K. Hughes","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933707","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 --> Whithering: <span>Or ’Tis Twenty Years Since</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Linda K. Hughes (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>I</strong> open by paying tribute to John Lamb, the outgoing editor of <em>Victorian Poetry</em>, who suggested the idea—a brilliant one—for this special issue back in 2022. The collected essays it gathers comprise a fitting capstone to his editorship of <em>Victorian Poetry</em> from 2005 to 2023.</p> <p>This afterword appends a meta-retrospect to the retrospects (as well as the forward-looking prospects) on Victorian poetry scholarship the issue’s gifted contributors offer. Rather than responding to each “Whither Redux” commentary in turn, I focus on the larger impressions and cumulative status report on the fortunes of Victorian poetry they form. One happy revelation from the special issue is that so many of the nascent scholars who contributed to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” in 2003 have since had such successful and productive careers—a heartening fact when we more often hear about blocked or merely marginal opportunities within our profession. Some “Whither Redux?” essays can even be read as a collective memoir of professional life during the past two decades, especially Jason Rudy’s, Charles LaPorte’s, and Stephanie Weiner’s accounts of how their scholarship has evolved, sometimes in markedly new ways, over the course of their now mature careers. Continuities are evident as well as change; Michele Martinez continues to pursue research in the sister arts, now within a much wider ambit, and Helen Groth again focuses on poetry and photography, in this case, an 1891 Bodley Head edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s <em>Casa Guidi Windows</em> with an introductory essay by fin-de-siécle poet A. Mary F. Robinson (by then Mme. Darmesteter). Monique Morgan, Lee O’Brien, and Stephanie Weiner helpfully provide illuminating surveys of the 2003 “Whither?” special issue, enabling readers of the current issue to gauge more comprehensively how well the new directions embraced or predicted in 2003 have been borne out by subsequent scholarship. The major lacunae in these predictions of two decades <strong>[End Page 569]</strong> ago, Monique Morgan suggests, are the anti-racist and ecocritical approaches to poetry that are now central to innovative scholarship today.</p> <p>As is to be expected, the 2023 contributors form no monolithic group, nor a monolithic consensus. Whereas some emphasize the contraction of opportunity in the humanities generally, and poetry scholarship and classroom teaching in particular, others see an expansion. Those perceiving contraction especially underscore the dramatic decline of interest among students and other department faculty in historical studies, and an even more radical decline in “depth” reading, as do Charles La Porte, Lee O’Brien, Monique Morgan, and Marion Thain. Whe","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774759","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}
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Photography, Novelty, and Victorian Poetry <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Helen Groth (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>R</strong>eturning to my essay—“Consigned to Sepia: Remembering Victorian Poetry”—takes me back to a significant moment in the history of Victorian poetry criticism. It was a moment crystallized in many ways by Isobel Armstrong’s generative provocation to think Victorian poetry anew in <em>Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics</em> (1993). Victorian poetry was an uneven and various political art form that required new critical methods, Armstrong argued. The readings that she enlisted to make her case for the aesthetic and political complexity of a selection of poems by Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Browning, Arnold, and others, modeled a process of “double reading” that revealed the experimental and epistemological reflexivity of Victorian poetry: a “systematically ambiguous language, out of which expressive and phenomenological readings emerge.”<sup>1</sup></p> <p>I began my essay with an epigraph taken from Armstrong’s study that still intrigues me after multiple readings and many intervening years: “The major critical and theoretical movements of the twentieth century have been virtually silent about Victorian poetry. As the stranded remnants of high bourgeois liberalism, the poets have been consigned to sepia” (p. 1). These two sentences capture the urgency of a different “now” in two images of arrested development. The first evokes the acoustics of critical indifference: a resounding silence in contrast to the polemical noise generated around the nineteenth-century novel, Romanticism, or Modernism, to name just three dominant areas of theoretically ambitious critical inquiry in the second half of the twentieth century. The second enlists the metaphor of sepia, a visual effect often associated with photography in the nineteenth century and beyond, to capture the perceived untimeliness of Victorian poetry. The sepia image in Armstrong’s conceptual construction is the enemy of Victorian poetry, arresting its dynamic variety in a still image of smug middle-class conservatism, like an unflattering reddish-brown monochromatic portrait gathering dust on a neglected shelf in a rarely used room. <strong>[End Page 493]</strong></p> <p>Reading against the grain of Armstrong’s suggestive, albeit negative, conjuncture of a familiar visual effect (sometimes photographic) and Victorian poetry, my essay responded to her critical challenge with a certain degree of willful optimism. The resulting argument attempted to articulate a very different kind of “timely” relationship between the visual image and poetry to the one Armstrong had in mind: a relationship materialized in the form of the photographically illustrated book and brokered by a poetics sensitized to the commerce of publication. To make my case I drew on archi
以下是内容的简要摘录，以代替摘要： 摄影、新奇和维多利亚时期的诗歌 海伦-格罗斯（Helen Groth）（简历） 回到我的文章--"Consigned to Sepia：回忆维多利亚时期的诗歌"--让我回想起维多利亚时期诗歌批评史上的一个重要时刻。伊泽贝尔-阿姆斯特朗（Isobel Armstrong）在《维多利亚诗歌》（Victorian Poetry）一书中对维多利亚诗歌进行了新的思考，这在许多方面使这一时刻变得具体化：诗歌、诗学、政治学》（1993 年）。阿姆斯特朗认为，维多利亚时期的诗歌是一种不均衡的、多种多样的政治艺术形式，需要新的批评方法。她通过阅读丁尼生、巴雷特-勃朗宁、勃朗宁、阿诺德等人的精选诗作，论证了其美学和政治的复杂性，并以 "双重阅读 "过程为模型，揭示了维多利亚时期诗歌的实验性和认识论的反身性："一种系统的模棱两可的语言，从这种语言中产生了表现性和现象学的阅读"："二十世纪的主要批评和理论运动对维多利亚时期的诗歌几乎保持沉默。作为高级资产阶级自由主义的残余，维多利亚时期的诗人已被归入淡褐色"（第 1 页）。这两句话从两个发展停滞的意象中捕捉到了不同 "现在 "的紧迫感。第一句让人联想到批评界漠不关心的声音：与围绕十九世纪小说、浪漫主义或现代主义（仅举二十世纪下半叶理论上雄心勃勃的批评探索的三个主要领域为例）所产生的论战噪音形成鲜明对比的是一片寂静。其次，阿姆斯特朗运用了棕褐色的隐喻--一种在十九世纪及以后经常与摄影联系在一起的视觉效果--来捕捉维多利亚时期诗歌中被认为是不合乎时宜的东西。在阿姆斯特朗的概念建构中，棕褐色图像是维多利亚时期诗歌的敌人，它在自以为是的中产阶级保守主义的静止图像中捕捉到了诗歌的动态变化，就像一幅不雅观的红褐色单色肖像画，在很少有人使用的房间里被忽视的架子上积满了灰尘。[阿姆斯特朗将人们熟悉的视觉效果（有时是摄影效果）与维多利亚时期的诗歌结合在一起，尽管是负面的，但我的文章却与之背道而驰，以某种程度的任性乐观回应了她的批评挑战。由此产生的论点试图阐明视觉图像与诗歌之间与阿姆斯特朗所设想的截然不同的 "及时 "关系：这种关系以摄影插图书籍的形式具体化，并由对出版商业敏感的诗学所促成。为了证明我的观点，我利用了档案资料，这些资料是十九世纪利用摄影的新颖性为斯科特、华兹华斯、丁尼生和巴雷特-勃朗宁等著名诗人的作品配图的努力。我在 2003 年的文章中重点提到的例子是伊丽莎白-巴雷特-勃朗宁的长篇政治诗《Casa Guidi Windows》的 1891 年 Bodley Head 版2 ，该版本由评论家兼诗人艾格尼丝-玛丽-弗朗西丝-罗宾逊 (Agnes Mary Frances Robinson) 介绍，并将勃朗宁夫妇在意大利旅居期间的住所 Casa Guidi 的照片作为封面插图3。正如我文章的标题所暗示的，下面对这本薄薄的书的分析将探讨摄影插图是如何索引维多利亚时期诗歌与商业生产模式之间的矛盾关系的，照片在Bodley Head出版社成立后最初几年出版的装饰性限量版中的噱头性副文本功能就是一个例子4。本文的第一部分将 Casa Guidi 的照片和罗宾逊的序言作为副文本进行解读，它们最终都发挥了类似的评价功能：这是一个同步的结构 "门槛"，引发了一系列问题。是出于权宜之计？正如 Sianne Ngai 所描述的那样，这是一种省力的噱头，它有效地将朝圣的逻辑（时间和地理）视觉化，而这正是这本诗集的目的之一，正如罗宾逊的序言所明确指出的。
{"title":"Photography, Novelty, and Victorian Poetry","authors":"Helen Groth","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933700","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 --> Photography, Novelty, and Victorian Poetry <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Helen Groth (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>R</strong>eturning to my essay—“Consigned to Sepia: Remembering Victorian Poetry”—takes me back to a significant moment in the history of Victorian poetry criticism. It was a moment crystallized in many ways by Isobel Armstrong’s generative provocation to think Victorian poetry anew in <em>Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics</em> (1993). Victorian poetry was an uneven and various political art form that required new critical methods, Armstrong argued. The readings that she enlisted to make her case for the aesthetic and political complexity of a selection of poems by Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Browning, Arnold, and others, modeled a process of “double reading” that revealed the experimental and epistemological reflexivity of Victorian poetry: a “systematically ambiguous language, out of which expressive and phenomenological readings emerge.”<sup>1</sup></p> <p>I began my essay with an epigraph taken from Armstrong’s study that still intrigues me after multiple readings and many intervening years: “The major critical and theoretical movements of the twentieth century have been virtually silent about Victorian poetry. As the stranded remnants of high bourgeois liberalism, the poets have been consigned to sepia” (p. 1). These two sentences capture the urgency of a different “now” in two images of arrested development. The first evokes the acoustics of critical indifference: a resounding silence in contrast to the polemical noise generated around the nineteenth-century novel, Romanticism, or Modernism, to name just three dominant areas of theoretically ambitious critical inquiry in the second half of the twentieth century. The second enlists the metaphor of sepia, a visual effect often associated with photography in the nineteenth century and beyond, to capture the perceived untimeliness of Victorian poetry. The sepia image in Armstrong’s conceptual construction is the enemy of Victorian poetry, arresting its dynamic variety in a still image of smug middle-class conservatism, like an unflattering reddish-brown monochromatic portrait gathering dust on a neglected shelf in a rarely used room. <strong>[End Page 493]</strong></p> <p>Reading against the grain of Armstrong’s suggestive, albeit negative, conjuncture of a familiar visual effect (sometimes photographic) and Victorian poetry, my essay responded to her critical challenge with a certain degree of willful optimism. The resulting argument attempted to articulate a very different kind of “timely” relationship between the visual image and poetry to the one Armstrong had in mind: a relationship materialized in the form of the photographically illustrated book and brokered by a poetics sensitized to the commerce of publication. To make my case I drew on archi","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774756","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}
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Women and Light Verse: <span>On May Kendall</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lee Behlman (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>S</strong>everal years ago, I wrote in <em>Victorian Poetry</em> about the long history and shifting critical conceptions of light verse, or what for much of the nineteenth century was called <em>vers de société</em>.<sup>1</sup> This was verse typically set in a refined social milieu, with a male speaker, and having the qualities of what one nineteenth-century critic, Frederic Locker-Lampson, called “brevity and buoyancy.”<sup>2</sup> Exploring the work of practitioners and critics of the form, I noted that a specifically comic register, while never excluded, was not viewed as its essential characteristic until the early twentieth century. Before then, <em>vers de société</em> “dwelled in a conceptual middle ground defined by balance and detachment—emotional, formal, even philosophical,” including “an Enlightenment-era aesthetic of poised, ‘polished’ form; an emotional tenor set between raucous humor and tragedy; and a philosophic position of detachment from and acceptance of life’s suffering.”<sup>3</sup> That essay became a point of departure for a broader exploration of the critical potential for the study of verse as an alternative to its ostensibly more elevated counterpart, poetry, that I undertook with Olivia Loksing Moy. In the introduction to our edited collection, <em>Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life</em> (2023), we offer what we term “verse studies” as a framework for engaging with the vast poetic output of the nineteenth century, in order “to counter critical tendencies that have long narrowed our curricula and our scholarly practices.”<sup>4</sup> Our contributors explore such subjects as the crucial periodical contexts for most Victorian verse production as well as verse forms such as ballades and rondels, hymns, children’s poetry, comic verse published in <em>Punch</em> and <em>Fun</em>, working-class and colonial ballads, and sonnets written for parlor games.</p> <p>A pathway that I’d like to offer here for verse studies is to return to the subject of specifically <em>light</em> verse—a vast corpus that, with the notable exception of recent work on nonsense verse, remains underexplored<sup>5</sup>—in a different context: How did women poets, who increasingly adopted new <strong>[End Page 531]</strong> authorial personas as the influence of the poetess tradition began to wane in the later nineteenth century, take up the mantle of lightness? I’ve selected a signal example to explore, the poet May Kendall (1861–1943), a figure invoked by Marion Thain in a notable essay from the first <em>Whither Victorian Poetry?</em> special issue. In 2003, after a recent wave of scholarship recovering the work of non-canonical Victorian women poets, Thain used May Kendall to frame the question
{"title":"Women and Light Verse: On May Kendall","authors":"Lee Behlman","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933703","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 --> Women and Light Verse: <span>On May Kendall</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lee Behlman (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>S</strong>everal years ago, I wrote in <em>Victorian Poetry</em> about the long history and shifting critical conceptions of light verse, or what for much of the nineteenth century was called <em>vers de société</em>.<sup>1</sup> This was verse typically set in a refined social milieu, with a male speaker, and having the qualities of what one nineteenth-century critic, Frederic Locker-Lampson, called “brevity and buoyancy.”<sup>2</sup> Exploring the work of practitioners and critics of the form, I noted that a specifically comic register, while never excluded, was not viewed as its essential characteristic until the early twentieth century. Before then, <em>vers de société</em> “dwelled in a conceptual middle ground defined by balance and detachment—emotional, formal, even philosophical,” including “an Enlightenment-era aesthetic of poised, ‘polished’ form; an emotional tenor set between raucous humor and tragedy; and a philosophic position of detachment from and acceptance of life’s suffering.”<sup>3</sup> That essay became a point of departure for a broader exploration of the critical potential for the study of verse as an alternative to its ostensibly more elevated counterpart, poetry, that I undertook with Olivia Loksing Moy. In the introduction to our edited collection, <em>Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life</em> (2023), we offer what we term “verse studies” as a framework for engaging with the vast poetic output of the nineteenth century, in order “to counter critical tendencies that have long narrowed our curricula and our scholarly practices.”<sup>4</sup> Our contributors explore such subjects as the crucial periodical contexts for most Victorian verse production as well as verse forms such as ballades and rondels, hymns, children’s poetry, comic verse published in <em>Punch</em> and <em>Fun</em>, working-class and colonial ballads, and sonnets written for parlor games.</p> <p>A pathway that I’d like to offer here for verse studies is to return to the subject of specifically <em>light</em> verse—a vast corpus that, with the notable exception of recent work on nonsense verse, remains underexplored<sup>5</sup>—in a different context: How did women poets, who increasingly adopted new <strong>[End Page 531]</strong> authorial personas as the influence of the poetess tradition began to wane in the later nineteenth century, take up the mantle of lightness? I’ve selected a signal example to explore, the poet May Kendall (1861–1943), a figure invoked by Marion Thain in a notable essay from the first <em>Whither Victorian Poetry?</em> special issue. In 2003, after a recent wave of scholarship recovering the work of non-canonical Victorian women poets, Thain used May Kendall to frame the question","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"114 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774894","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}
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Poetry, Politics, Possibilities <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Monique R. Morgan (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>M</strong>y title is meant both as an homage to the subtitle of Isobel Armstrong’s foundational study, <em>Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics</em>, and as an evocation of the possibilities this group of scholars saw twenty years ago and those we see today. In preparing to write this essay, I reread the “Whither Victorian Poetry?” 2003 special issue and I was struck by three things. First, the topics and methodologies most frequently called for by the issue’s contributors became important trends in the field in the intervening twenty years. Second, two of the most important current methods in the field—anti-racist scholarship and ecocriticism—were much less frequently mentioned in the issue. Third, many contributors expressed a sense of crisis, both within academic institutions and in global politics, and our sense of crisis has only become more urgent in 2023.</p> <p>I’ll start with the good news: the ways in which our predictions have come to fruition and the collective accomplishments of scholars writing about Victorian poetry. In the contributions to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” we can find several topics that were foregrounded in multiple essays, including Victorian poetry’s relations to genre (both to specific poetic genres and to the novel), to other media (especially painting and photography), and to book history, print culture, and periodicals. Several essays called for greater attention to issues of periodization and to the long nineteenth century. I do not have space in this essay to recognize properly the abundant and important work that has been done in the past two decades on these topics. Instead, I will foreground a few examples of recent work on two other topics that frequently occurred in “Whither Victorian Poetry?” and are topics with which my own work has engaged: New Formalism and Victorian women poets.</p> <p>In my 2003 essay, I praised an emerging scholarly movement in which “[c]lose attention to formal features is seen as crucial to an understanding of a text’s social and political meanings, and poems are viewed not as univocal conveyors of an (implicit or explicit) ideological content, but rather as sites of exploration and contestation of (sometimes <strong>[End Page 507]</strong> incompatible) views.”<sup>1</sup> Several other contributors also noted this movement and cited Isobel Armstrong’s <em>Victorian Poetry</em> (1993) and Susan Wolfson’s <em>Formal Charges</em> (1997) as foundational texts, but there was not yet a consensus on what to call this new movement. I, rather awkwardly, called it “politically inflected formalism” (p. 502). Jason Rudy borrowed the term “neoformalism” from Herbert Tucker and adopted the phrase “cultural neoformalism” as one possible label for a developin
{"title":"Poetry, Politics, Possibilities","authors":"Monique R. Morgan","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933701","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 --> Poetry, Politics, Possibilities <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Monique R. Morgan (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>M</strong>y title is meant both as an homage to the subtitle of Isobel Armstrong’s foundational study, <em>Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics</em>, and as an evocation of the possibilities this group of scholars saw twenty years ago and those we see today. In preparing to write this essay, I reread the “Whither Victorian Poetry?” 2003 special issue and I was struck by three things. First, the topics and methodologies most frequently called for by the issue’s contributors became important trends in the field in the intervening twenty years. Second, two of the most important current methods in the field—anti-racist scholarship and ecocriticism—were much less frequently mentioned in the issue. Third, many contributors expressed a sense of crisis, both within academic institutions and in global politics, and our sense of crisis has only become more urgent in 2023.</p> <p>I’ll start with the good news: the ways in which our predictions have come to fruition and the collective accomplishments of scholars writing about Victorian poetry. In the contributions to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” we can find several topics that were foregrounded in multiple essays, including Victorian poetry’s relations to genre (both to specific poetic genres and to the novel), to other media (especially painting and photography), and to book history, print culture, and periodicals. Several essays called for greater attention to issues of periodization and to the long nineteenth century. I do not have space in this essay to recognize properly the abundant and important work that has been done in the past two decades on these topics. Instead, I will foreground a few examples of recent work on two other topics that frequently occurred in “Whither Victorian Poetry?” and are topics with which my own work has engaged: New Formalism and Victorian women poets.</p> <p>In my 2003 essay, I praised an emerging scholarly movement in which “[c]lose attention to formal features is seen as crucial to an understanding of a text’s social and political meanings, and poems are viewed not as univocal conveyors of an (implicit or explicit) ideological content, but rather as sites of exploration and contestation of (sometimes <strong>[End Page 507]</strong> incompatible) views.”<sup>1</sup> Several other contributors also noted this movement and cited Isobel Armstrong’s <em>Victorian Poetry</em> (1993) and Susan Wolfson’s <em>Formal Charges</em> (1997) as foundational texts, but there was not yet a consensus on what to call this new movement. I, rather awkwardly, called it “politically inflected formalism” (p. 502). Jason Rudy borrowed the term “neoformalism” from Herbert Tucker and adopted the phrase “cultural neoformalism” as one possible label for a developin","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"81 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774752","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}
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Victorian Poetry in an Age of Cultural Secularization <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Charles LaPorte (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>T</strong>wenty years ago, as a graduate student about to test the academic job market, I was thrilled to be invited to speculate about the future of Victorian poetry alongside a set of brilliant early-career scholars. Looking back on that special issue today as a middle-aged professor, I again find myself gratified by the brilliancy of my colleagues, most of whose essays have aged beautifully. My own contribution to that special issue, by contrast, has aged less well, partly because I took for granted the ongoing institutional health of the humanities in twenty-first-century higher education. Anyone who has been paying attention to public discourses about education in the intervening years (at least in the States) will likely share my new-found disquietude. I retain hope for the future of our field, believing in poetry as I do, but the future brings real challenges ahead that I will address in the second half of this essay.</p> <p>In that 2003 essay, I celebrated and looked forward to new possibilities afforded by online databases to turbocharge our study of Victorian poetic culture and poetic subcultures. I pointed out that we could better understand “poetry as a specific cultural behavior” when we had better access to the specific ways that Victorian poetry and poetic commentary first circulated.<sup>1</sup> I prophesied that</p> <blockquote> <p>present and future online database research will not only revolutionize the way that we conceive of the Victorian cultural tradition, but it will create a more egalitarian worldwide scholarly community by making available good reproductions of rare books, manuscripts, and periodicals.</p> (p. 523) </blockquote> <p>Ultimately, as I reasoned, our academic field would be galvanized by the literary sociology of a thousand Pierre (or Pierrette) Bourdieus, tracing the context of poetry and its circulation across the world in a print network of meaning that we could then study from any number of angles, from the global (What <strong>[End Page 561]</strong> kinds of poems appear in English-language newspapers in mid-century Manchester? 1870s Ontario? fin-de-siècle Bengal?) to the granular (How does such-and-such a coterie magazine lay out its filler poetry from decade to decade?). Victorian poetry itself seemed to be exploding outward into endless enchanting possibilities. In meaningful ways, it is doing so still.</p> <p>It is now hard for me to look back at my prophecy of a future “egalitarian worldwide scholarly community” without cringing, however. In reality, literary research databases have been neither uniformly “egalitarian” nor “worldwide.” For instance, when the COVID-19 lockdown closed university libraries, deep-pocketed institutions pivoted quickly to
{"title":"Victorian Poetry in an Age of Cultural Secularization","authors":"Charles LaPorte","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933706","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 Poetry in an Age of Cultural Secularization <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Charles LaPorte (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>T</strong>wenty years ago, as a graduate student about to test the academic job market, I was thrilled to be invited to speculate about the future of Victorian poetry alongside a set of brilliant early-career scholars. Looking back on that special issue today as a middle-aged professor, I again find myself gratified by the brilliancy of my colleagues, most of whose essays have aged beautifully. My own contribution to that special issue, by contrast, has aged less well, partly because I took for granted the ongoing institutional health of the humanities in twenty-first-century higher education. Anyone who has been paying attention to public discourses about education in the intervening years (at least in the States) will likely share my new-found disquietude. I retain hope for the future of our field, believing in poetry as I do, but the future brings real challenges ahead that I will address in the second half of this essay.</p> <p>In that 2003 essay, I celebrated and looked forward to new possibilities afforded by online databases to turbocharge our study of Victorian poetic culture and poetic subcultures. I pointed out that we could better understand “poetry as a specific cultural behavior” when we had better access to the specific ways that Victorian poetry and poetic commentary first circulated.<sup>1</sup> I prophesied that</p> <blockquote> <p>present and future online database research will not only revolutionize the way that we conceive of the Victorian cultural tradition, but it will create a more egalitarian worldwide scholarly community by making available good reproductions of rare books, manuscripts, and periodicals.</p> (p. 523) </blockquote> <p>Ultimately, as I reasoned, our academic field would be galvanized by the literary sociology of a thousand Pierre (or Pierrette) Bourdieus, tracing the context of poetry and its circulation across the world in a print network of meaning that we could then study from any number of angles, from the global (What <strong>[End Page 561]</strong> kinds of poems appear in English-language newspapers in mid-century Manchester? 1870s Ontario? fin-de-siècle Bengal?) to the granular (How does such-and-such a coterie magazine lay out its filler poetry from decade to decade?). Victorian poetry itself seemed to be exploding outward into endless enchanting possibilities. In meaningful ways, it is doing so still.</p> <p>It is now hard for me to look back at my prophecy of a future “egalitarian worldwide scholarly community” without cringing, however. In reality, literary research databases have been neither uniformly “egalitarian” nor “worldwide.” For instance, when the COVID-19 lockdown closed university libraries, deep-pocketed institutions pivoted quickly to","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774757","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}
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Introduction: <span>The Place of Victorian Poetry</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> John B. Lamb </li> </ul> <p>“The future of poetry is immense.” So claimed Matthew Arnold in “The Study of Poetry” originally published in 1880 as the general introduction to <em>The English Poets</em>, edited by T. H. Ward. Arnold went on to encourage his readers to “conceive of [poetry] as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete.”<sup>1</sup></p> <p>“The Study of Poetry” is perhaps most notable not for those English poets Arnold excludes from the narrow confines of the “classic”—Chaucer, Pope, Burns, and all the Romantics save Wordsworth—but for those he fails to mention at all, those contemporary Victorian poets whose major work was published by 1880. However, the study of the Victorian poets Arnold consigns to the hinterlands of literary history, as well as their fin-de-siècle compatriots, has since 1963 found its place in <em>Victorian Poetry</em>.</p> <p>Today, Arnold’s proscriptions may seem to us, as they did to some of his contemporaries, more like an act of border control designed “not just to distinguish but to <em>keep apart</em>.” As the philosopher Edward Casey suggests, “Every border is constructed such that it is closed or subject to closure.” But a boundary, Casey maintains, is “intrinsically permeable; it is porous by its very nature.”<sup>2</sup> Boundaries have an “inherent openness and vagueness of spatial extent”;<sup>3</sup> and the ever-expanding boundaries of nineteenth-century poetry and its study are once again charted in this issue, “Whither Victorian Poetry Redux.”</p> <p>Certain forms of critical practice, not only during the nineteenth century but also in our own era of book banning and the unrelenting assault on the humanities, appear committed to shoring up the allegedly porous borders of literary and cultural history--some may cross but others may not. But for the past six decades <em>Victorian Poetry</em>, led by a committed and always insightful band of scholars, has been mining the rich repositories of nineteenth-century <strong>[End Page 433]</strong> poetry while at the same time undermining the borders—those cultural and institutional walls still prevalent today—that would consign poetry and its study to permanent exile.</p> <p>In a discussion of the work of the writer and naturalist Richard Mabey, the geographer Hayden Lorimer notes, “What Mabey’s work seems to exemplify is a certain way of carrying yourself into the craft of study: where the shape of a topic cannot be said to exist, but rather to occur in the act.”<sup>4</sup> But all too often, partic
{"title":"Introduction: The Place of Victorian Poetry","authors":"John B. Lamb","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933695","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 --> Introduction: <span>The Place of Victorian Poetry</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> John B. Lamb </li> </ul> <p>“The future of poetry is immense.” So claimed Matthew Arnold in “The Study of Poetry” originally published in 1880 as the general introduction to <em>The English Poets</em>, edited by T. H. Ward. Arnold went on to encourage his readers to “conceive of [poetry] as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete.”<sup>1</sup></p> <p>“The Study of Poetry” is perhaps most notable not for those English poets Arnold excludes from the narrow confines of the “classic”—Chaucer, Pope, Burns, and all the Romantics save Wordsworth—but for those he fails to mention at all, those contemporary Victorian poets whose major work was published by 1880. However, the study of the Victorian poets Arnold consigns to the hinterlands of literary history, as well as their fin-de-siècle compatriots, has since 1963 found its place in <em>Victorian Poetry</em>.</p> <p>Today, Arnold’s proscriptions may seem to us, as they did to some of his contemporaries, more like an act of border control designed “not just to distinguish but to <em>keep apart</em>.” As the philosopher Edward Casey suggests, “Every border is constructed such that it is closed or subject to closure.” But a boundary, Casey maintains, is “intrinsically permeable; it is porous by its very nature.”<sup>2</sup> Boundaries have an “inherent openness and vagueness of spatial extent”;<sup>3</sup> and the ever-expanding boundaries of nineteenth-century poetry and its study are once again charted in this issue, “Whither Victorian Poetry Redux.”</p> <p>Certain forms of critical practice, not only during the nineteenth century but also in our own era of book banning and the unrelenting assault on the humanities, appear committed to shoring up the allegedly porous borders of literary and cultural history--some may cross but others may not. But for the past six decades <em>Victorian Poetry</em>, led by a committed and always insightful band of scholars, has been mining the rich repositories of nineteenth-century <strong>[End Page 433]</strong> poetry while at the same time undermining the borders—those cultural and institutional walls still prevalent today—that would consign poetry and its study to permanent exile.</p> <p>In a discussion of the work of the writer and naturalist Richard Mabey, the geographer Hayden Lorimer notes, “What Mabey’s work seems to exemplify is a certain way of carrying yourself into the craft of study: where the shape of a topic cannot be said to exist, but rather to occur in the act.”<sup>4</sup> But all too often, partic","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774747","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}
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Reflections on Twenty Years in Victorian Poetry <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Stephanie Kuduk Weiner (bio) </li> </ul> <p>When I received the invitation to contribute to this special issue, I did three things. Inspired by John Lamb’s idea, borrowed from Tim Ingold, that “we know <em>as</em> we go, not <em>before</em> we go,” I diagrammed my journey as a scholar and teacher over the last twenty years.<sup>1</sup> Then I read the whole “Whither Victorian Poetry?” special issue from 2003 and most of the articles that have appeared in <em>Victorian Poetry</em> in the last five years. I was curious: Where did we think we were headed, back then, and where are we now? This essay is about the observations that arose from this non-exhaustive, admittedly idiosyncratic bit of research. In a nutshell, “Whither Victorian Poetry?” was amazingly prescient of what came afterward, for me personally and for scholars in the field as a whole. It was fascinating to see how our concerns of 2003 reverberated from 2018–2023. I also saw more clearly how my own journey tacked back and forth between scholarship and teaching, and how my orientation toward the field has shifted from looking for gaps to gravitating toward energetic conversations.</p> <h2>Whither Points the Way</h2> <p>I was most struck in turning back to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” by how fully it predicted what looks in retrospect like a big methodological shift in our field. In the special issue, many contributors called on us to “attend to both historical context and the processes of signification,” as Anne Hartman put it.<sup>2</sup> There was an excitement in 2003, which I certainly remember sharing but had since forgotten, about bringing together historicist and formalist approaches to literary interpretation. The excitement can be felt in descriptions of this methodology as innovative and as gaining steam, for example in Monique R. Morgan’s essay: “We are witnessing the beginnings of a new trend in literary criticism, one that respects both the formal structures and the social contexts of poems” (p. 500). Jason R. Rudy agreed: “we can now imagine techniques of formal analysis that bring to literary texts the direct opposite of New Critical decontextualization” by “tak[ing] literary form as a subtle and often <strong>[End Page 445]</strong> neglected vehicle for broader cultural forces” (p. 590). Now I don’t think Victorian poetry scholars feel any need to justify this approach! We just do this kind of thing—or not—investigating formal and historical questions on their own or (more often) together, without making a big deal about it. For me, to encounter this moment in the methodological history of our field afresh was like meeting the college-age child of an old friend, giving me a surprising, sudden sense that twenty years is actually a long time, a span in which a lot can change
{"title":"Reflections on Twenty Years in Victorian Poetry","authors":"Stephanie Kuduk Weiner","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933697","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 --> Reflections on Twenty Years in Victorian Poetry <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Stephanie Kuduk Weiner (bio) </li> </ul> <p>When I received the invitation to contribute to this special issue, I did three things. Inspired by John Lamb’s idea, borrowed from Tim Ingold, that “we know <em>as</em> we go, not <em>before</em> we go,” I diagrammed my journey as a scholar and teacher over the last twenty years.<sup>1</sup> Then I read the whole “Whither Victorian Poetry?” special issue from 2003 and most of the articles that have appeared in <em>Victorian Poetry</em> in the last five years. I was curious: Where did we think we were headed, back then, and where are we now? This essay is about the observations that arose from this non-exhaustive, admittedly idiosyncratic bit of research. In a nutshell, “Whither Victorian Poetry?” was amazingly prescient of what came afterward, for me personally and for scholars in the field as a whole. It was fascinating to see how our concerns of 2003 reverberated from 2018–2023. I also saw more clearly how my own journey tacked back and forth between scholarship and teaching, and how my orientation toward the field has shifted from looking for gaps to gravitating toward energetic conversations.</p> <h2>Whither Points the Way</h2> <p>I was most struck in turning back to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” by how fully it predicted what looks in retrospect like a big methodological shift in our field. In the special issue, many contributors called on us to “attend to both historical context and the processes of signification,” as Anne Hartman put it.<sup>2</sup> There was an excitement in 2003, which I certainly remember sharing but had since forgotten, about bringing together historicist and formalist approaches to literary interpretation. The excitement can be felt in descriptions of this methodology as innovative and as gaining steam, for example in Monique R. Morgan’s essay: “We are witnessing the beginnings of a new trend in literary criticism, one that respects both the formal structures and the social contexts of poems” (p. 500). Jason R. Rudy agreed: “we can now imagine techniques of formal analysis that bring to literary texts the direct opposite of New Critical decontextualization” by “tak[ing] literary form as a subtle and often <strong>[End Page 445]</strong> neglected vehicle for broader cultural forces” (p. 590). Now I don’t think Victorian poetry scholars feel any need to justify this approach! We just do this kind of thing—or not—investigating formal and historical questions on their own or (more often) together, without making a big deal about it. For me, to encounter this moment in the methodological history of our field afresh was like meeting the college-age child of an old friend, giving me a surprising, sudden sense that twenty years is actually a long time, a span in which a lot can change","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774749","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}
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Reading Victorian Poetry as the World Burns <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Marion Thain (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>I</strong> write this in summer 2023 as an unprecedented heatwave burns up nearby southern Europe and beyond. Climate change has become a frightening reality in data that has already, this year, provided evidence of endless “firsts” or “highests.” In this context, why read Victorian poetry? Who cares, and why should anyone care? This is a particularly pertinent question to ask at the sixtieth anniversary of the journal <em>Victorian Poetry</em>, whose leadership has shaped the field under the fine stewardship of John Lamb, and which is about to pass to a new editor-in-chief.</p> <p>In the 2002 issue (revisited in this present issue), I wrote about the category of “women’s poetry”: what is a “woman poet” and, crucially, how did that concept develop historically.<sup>1</sup> More specifically, how did the idea of women’s poetry frame engagement with the writing and reception of poetry by women in the nineteenth century? And how might we usefully trouble the deceptively unified category of “women’s poetry”? Pointing out that the category was not always being used as a biological-sex-based category (Alfred Miles’s well known anthology, I noted, included the work of female poets in volumes other than the one specifically devoted to “women’s poetry”), I concluded that women’s poetry was, in the late nineteenth century, as much a genre-based category as a gender-based one. What might we learn from exploring this late-nineteenth century gender taxonomy at the present moment, in which the nature of the category “woman” is (at least in some quarters) much discussed? That analysis of the concept of “women’s poetry” in 2002 has gained a potential whole new relevance as the categories of “women’s sport” and “women’s toilets” have become contentious in recent years. The recognition of the highly constructed nature of the categories of poetess and the “woman poet” provides a foundation and touchstone for the questions that are now being asked about gender identity: about the multiplicity of identities within and across categories, and the way those categories are inhabited. We are once again, and in a new way, at a moment when the issue of gender categorization is relevant and important <strong>[End Page 543]</strong> in public discourse. At the same time as the concept of “woman writer” is necessarily being explored afresh, a number of talented new scholars are working on the formation of trans-identity discourses in late nineteenth-century literature. The late nineteenth-century moment in which sexology, psychoanalysis, and the queer identities of decadence were providing new discourses and taxonomies for gender and sexuality is a moment that needs to be read in relation to the attempts of our current age to find ways of ar
{"title":"Reading Victorian Poetry as the World Burns","authors":"Marion Thain","doi":"10.1353/vp.2024.a933704","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2024.a933704","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 --> Reading Victorian Poetry as the World Burns <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Marion Thain (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>I</strong> write this in summer 2023 as an unprecedented heatwave burns up nearby southern Europe and beyond. Climate change has become a frightening reality in data that has already, this year, provided evidence of endless “firsts” or “highests.” In this context, why read Victorian poetry? Who cares, and why should anyone care? This is a particularly pertinent question to ask at the sixtieth anniversary of the journal <em>Victorian Poetry</em>, whose leadership has shaped the field under the fine stewardship of John Lamb, and which is about to pass to a new editor-in-chief.</p> <p>In the 2002 issue (revisited in this present issue), I wrote about the category of “women’s poetry”: what is a “woman poet” and, crucially, how did that concept develop historically.<sup>1</sup> More specifically, how did the idea of women’s poetry frame engagement with the writing and reception of poetry by women in the nineteenth century? And how might we usefully trouble the deceptively unified category of “women’s poetry”? Pointing out that the category was not always being used as a biological-sex-based category (Alfred Miles’s well known anthology, I noted, included the work of female poets in volumes other than the one specifically devoted to “women’s poetry”), I concluded that women’s poetry was, in the late nineteenth century, as much a genre-based category as a gender-based one. What might we learn from exploring this late-nineteenth century gender taxonomy at the present moment, in which the nature of the category “woman” is (at least in some quarters) much discussed? That analysis of the concept of “women’s poetry” in 2002 has gained a potential whole new relevance as the categories of “women’s sport” and “women’s toilets” have become contentious in recent years. The recognition of the highly constructed nature of the categories of poetess and the “woman poet” provides a foundation and touchstone for the questions that are now being asked about gender identity: about the multiplicity of identities within and across categories, and the way those categories are inhabited. We are once again, and in a new way, at a moment when the issue of gender categorization is relevant and important <strong>[End Page 543]</strong> in public discourse. At the same time as the concept of “woman writer” is necessarily being explored afresh, a number of talented new scholars are working on the formation of trans-identity discourses in late nineteenth-century literature. The late nineteenth-century moment in which sexology, psychoanalysis, and the queer identities of decadence were providing new discourses and taxonomies for gender and sexuality is a moment that needs to be read in relation to the attempts of our current age to find ways of ar","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141774755","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：