<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> “The child’s sob in the silence curses deeper”: <span>Language of Voice and Dialogue of Reform in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children”</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Reilly L. Fitzpatrick (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>L</strong>ike many of her literary contemporaries, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her poetic work have been reevaluated in recent years to determine whether her status as a white, educated, upper-middle-class woman disqualifies her from effectively advocating for marginalized populations—such as factory workers or enslaved women—since she did not experience their oppression firsthand. Increasingly cognizant of the use of privileged literary voices to appropriate and perpetuate oppression throughout history, scholars have recently identified and critiqued many authors that misrepresent and profit from marginalized experiences that are not their own. In considering the ethical and literary dimensions of this ongoing issue of representation, the language of voice is central. Does an author speak on behalf of those for whom they advocate, or speak instead of them? Is an author attempting to give a silenced population the opportunity to be heard, or to be a “voice for the voiceless” when they are actively participating in and benefiting from the cultural systems that silence those who could otherwise speak for themselves?<sup>1</sup> In this article, I ask these questions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 poem “The Cry of the Children” to determine whether her effort to advocate for industrial reform through verse creates space for silenced voices to speak or ultimately appropriates the suffering of working children to further her poetic reputation or artistic vision.</p> <p>“The Cry of the Children” is alternatingly voiced by children working in British industrial contexts and a narrator; the poem explicates the brutality of children’s work in factories and mines and calls for widespread reform. EBB<sup>2</sup> belonged to the upper middle class and, as one contemporary reviewer points out, joins the protest against factory and mining industrialization without ever <strong>[End Page 285]</strong> having “visited one of those ‘hives of industry’” herself.<sup>3</sup> From her privileged background, EBB’s only encounters with the working-class experience were mediated through various literary portrayals and publicized reports on factory and mine conditions. By writing a poem that speaks in the voices of these oppressed children and not just on their behalf, EBB seems to participate in the performative act of being a voice for the voiceless. Her poem articulates the cries <em>of</em> the children, not cries <em>for</em> them: as EBB assumes joint poetic speaker-ship through her narrator and the children, she utilizes her poetic authority not only to speak in an imagined narrative voice on beh
以下是内容的简要摘录，以代替摘要： "孩子在寂静中的啜泣诅咒更深"：伊丽莎白-巴雷特-勃朗宁《孩童的哭泣》中的声音语言与改革对话 Reilly L. Fitzpatrick（简历） 与许多同时代的文学家一样，伊丽莎白-巴雷特-勃朗宁及其诗歌作品近年来受到重新评价，以确定她作为受过教育的中上层白人女性的身份是否使她没有资格有效地为边缘化人群（如工厂工人或被奴役妇女）代言，因为她没有亲身经历他们所遭受的压迫。越来越多的学者认识到，在整个历史中，特权文学的声音被用来占有和延续压迫，他们最近发现并批评了许多作者，这些作者歪曲并利用了非自身经历的边缘化经验。在考虑这一持续存在的代表性问题的伦理和文学层面时，声音的语言是核心。作者是代表他们所倡导的那些人说话，还是代替他们说话？在本文中，我将对伊丽莎白-巴雷特-勃朗宁（Elizabeth Barrett Browning）1843 年的诗作《孩子们的哭声》（The Cry of the Children）提出这些问题，以确定她通过诗歌倡导工业改革的努力是为沉默的声音创造了说话的空间，还是最终挪用了童工的苦难来提升她的诗歌声誉或艺术视野。"儿童的哭泣 "由在英国工业环境中工作的儿童和一位叙述者交替说出；诗歌阐述了儿童在工厂和矿山工作的残酷性，并呼吁进行广泛的改革。正如一位当代评论家所指出的，EBB2 属于上层中产阶级，她加入了抗议工厂和矿山工业化的行列，但她本人却从未 [尾页 285]"参观过那些'工业蜂巢'"。通过写一首以这些受压迫儿童的声音而不仅仅是代表他们说话的诗，EBB 似乎参与了为无声者发声的表演行为。她的诗歌表达的是孩子们的呼声，而不是为他们的呼声：当伊丽莎白通过她的叙述者和孩子们共同承担诗歌说话者的角色时，她利用她的诗歌权威，不仅以一种想象的叙述声音代表工业改革说话，而且还以劳动儿童非常真实的声音说话，这些声音在当时一直被压制着。因此，易卜生在诗中的代表性声音修辞可以被理解为一种感伤化的方法，即为了自己的诗歌和政治利益，进一步压制儿童的声音，勒索他们的苦难。然而，在许多方面，伊丽莎白-巴雷特-贝宁通过诗中深刻的对话范式，预见到了这些潜在的反对意见，即她对工业压迫的表现，以及通过童工自身的声音呼吁改革。我认为，伊丽莎白-巴雷特-勃朗宁在《孩子们的呼声》中有效地去除了诗人身份，为在工厂和矿山工作的儿童提供了一个平台，让他们可以用自己的语言代表自己说话。伊比利用她的大众力量和诗歌力量，通过儿童合唱哭泣和咒骂的修辞手段，促成了童工与英国政府之间缺席但必要的对话。以对话诗歌的声音作为主要手段，她可以避免成为无声者的代言人，而是在公共论坛上将儿童的声音重新归属于他们自己，使他们的声音能够被听到。虽然有许多学术论文探讨了埃布尔在《孩子们的哭声》中作为诗人的角色和目标，但学者们对埃布尔在诗中是赋予了还是挪用了童工的声音意见不一，没有人考虑她的声音语言（体现在孩子们的哭声和咒骂声中）和对话结构是如何促成这种诗歌张力的。法比安...
{"title":"\"The child's sob in the silence curses deeper\": Language of Voice and Dialogue of Reform in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's \"The Cry of the Children\"","authors":"Reilly L. Fitzpatrick","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915652","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 --> “The child’s sob in the silence curses deeper”: <span>Language of Voice and Dialogue of Reform in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children”</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Reilly L. Fitzpatrick (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>L</strong>ike many of her literary contemporaries, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her poetic work have been reevaluated in recent years to determine whether her status as a white, educated, upper-middle-class woman disqualifies her from effectively advocating for marginalized populations—such as factory workers or enslaved women—since she did not experience their oppression firsthand. Increasingly cognizant of the use of privileged literary voices to appropriate and perpetuate oppression throughout history, scholars have recently identified and critiqued many authors that misrepresent and profit from marginalized experiences that are not their own. In considering the ethical and literary dimensions of this ongoing issue of representation, the language of voice is central. Does an author speak on behalf of those for whom they advocate, or speak instead of them? Is an author attempting to give a silenced population the opportunity to be heard, or to be a “voice for the voiceless” when they are actively participating in and benefiting from the cultural systems that silence those who could otherwise speak for themselves?<sup>1</sup> In this article, I ask these questions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 poem “The Cry of the Children” to determine whether her effort to advocate for industrial reform through verse creates space for silenced voices to speak or ultimately appropriates the suffering of working children to further her poetic reputation or artistic vision.</p> <p>“The Cry of the Children” is alternatingly voiced by children working in British industrial contexts and a narrator; the poem explicates the brutality of children’s work in factories and mines and calls for widespread reform. EBB<sup>2</sup> belonged to the upper middle class and, as one contemporary reviewer points out, joins the protest against factory and mining industrialization without ever <strong>[End Page 285]</strong> having “visited one of those ‘hives of industry’” herself.<sup>3</sup> From her privileged background, EBB’s only encounters with the working-class experience were mediated through various literary portrayals and publicized reports on factory and mine conditions. By writing a poem that speaks in the voices of these oppressed children and not just on their behalf, EBB seems to participate in the performative act of being a voice for the voiceless. Her poem articulates the cries <em>of</em> the children, not cries <em>for</em> them: as EBB assumes joint poetic speaker-ship through her narrator and the children, she utilizes her poetic authority not only to speak in an imagined narrative voice on beh","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"248 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138817925","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 --> Elizabeth Barrett Browning <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Beverly Taylor (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Once again, the most important contribution this year to EBB studies is a new volume of <em>The Brownings’ Correspondence</em> (Wedgestone Press, 2023). With volume 29 of the series, gathering the Brownings’ correspondence for February 1861 through November 1861, general editor Philip Kelley and his collaborator Edward Hagan bring the collection of meticulously edited letters by both Brownings and some of their correspondents up to the date when EBB died (Robert describes her final night, June 29, 1861, to his father and sister Sarianna; pp. 164–168). Though she died just a little more than halfway through the volume’s letters, EBB remains its focal point throughout, for the volume includes multiple contemporary reviews: <em>A Drama of Exile; Poems</em> (1850); <em>Casa Guidi Windows</em>; <em>Poems</em> (1856); <em>Aurora Leigh</em>; <em>Poems before Congress</em>; and retrospective general review essays. It also includes a generous sampling of obituary notices, brief, full, and fulsome (pp. 371–399), as well as a reminiscence by Mary Ayrault Craig, who knew the Brownings in Florence and recalls their relationship in the early days as “an experiment in marriage, triumphant and conclusive” (p. 404). Appendix I provides biographical sketches of Kate Field and of Thomas Adolphus Trollope and his wife, the poet Theodosia Garrow Trollope, whom EBB knew from her time in Torquay, where she indicated a lack of enthusiasm for Garrow Trollope’s poetry. The second appendix, which quotes supporting documents, includes a wide range of recollections of EBB from letters and diaries, most of them recording some version of the sentiment that EBB was “as perfect as God permits in the flesh” and her death is a great “loss to the world!” (pp. 287, 306). The volume annotates the letters with splendidly precise and illuminating notes. Like the previous volumes in the series, volume 29 of <em>The Brownings’ Correspondence</em> represents a model of what a scholarly edition should be. <strong>[End Page 345]</strong></p> <p>The volume’s earliest letters record EBB’s total immersion in Italian politics. With her friend Isa Blagden she discusses the role of France in Italy’s future and the character of the French emperor, Napoleon III. Along the way she explains to Sarianna the importance of sculpting to Robert, who can write poetry only when inspired to do so (p. 37), and she corrects Fanny Haworth’s understanding of Swedenborgianism in relation to spiritualism (p. 42). Letters from and about Walter Savage Landor remind us how difficult it must have been for Robert to serve as his guardian, and of Robert’s generosity in taking on the charge. In multiple letters EBB reaffirms her intention to spend three months in France with Robert’s family, mindful that her
{"title":"Elizabeth Barrett Browning","authors":"Beverly Taylor","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915655","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915655","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 --> Elizabeth Barrett Browning <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Beverly Taylor (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Once again, the most important contribution this year to EBB studies is a new volume of <em>The Brownings’ Correspondence</em> (Wedgestone Press, 2023). With volume 29 of the series, gathering the Brownings’ correspondence for February 1861 through November 1861, general editor Philip Kelley and his collaborator Edward Hagan bring the collection of meticulously edited letters by both Brownings and some of their correspondents up to the date when EBB died (Robert describes her final night, June 29, 1861, to his father and sister Sarianna; pp. 164–168). Though she died just a little more than halfway through the volume’s letters, EBB remains its focal point throughout, for the volume includes multiple contemporary reviews: <em>A Drama of Exile; Poems</em> (1850); <em>Casa Guidi Windows</em>; <em>Poems</em> (1856); <em>Aurora Leigh</em>; <em>Poems before Congress</em>; and retrospective general review essays. It also includes a generous sampling of obituary notices, brief, full, and fulsome (pp. 371–399), as well as a reminiscence by Mary Ayrault Craig, who knew the Brownings in Florence and recalls their relationship in the early days as “an experiment in marriage, triumphant and conclusive” (p. 404). Appendix I provides biographical sketches of Kate Field and of Thomas Adolphus Trollope and his wife, the poet Theodosia Garrow Trollope, whom EBB knew from her time in Torquay, where she indicated a lack of enthusiasm for Garrow Trollope’s poetry. The second appendix, which quotes supporting documents, includes a wide range of recollections of EBB from letters and diaries, most of them recording some version of the sentiment that EBB was “as perfect as God permits in the flesh” and her death is a great “loss to the world!” (pp. 287, 306). The volume annotates the letters with splendidly precise and illuminating notes. Like the previous volumes in the series, volume 29 of <em>The Brownings’ Correspondence</em> represents a model of what a scholarly edition should be. <strong>[End Page 345]</strong></p> <p>The volume’s earliest letters record EBB’s total immersion in Italian politics. With her friend Isa Blagden she discusses the role of France in Italy’s future and the character of the French emperor, Napoleon III. Along the way she explains to Sarianna the importance of sculpting to Robert, who can write poetry only when inspired to do so (p. 37), and she corrects Fanny Haworth’s understanding of Swedenborgianism in relation to spiritualism (p. 42). Letters from and about Walter Savage Landor remind us how difficult it must have been for Robert to serve as his guardian, and of Robert’s generosity in taking on the charge. In multiple letters EBB reaffirms her intention to spend three months in France with Robert’s family, mindful that her","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138817921","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 --> General Materials <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Albert D. Pionke (bio) </li> </ul> <p>This year’s survey of general materials features four monographs and one substantial chapter from a broader genre history. All are committed to positioning Victorian poetry relative to its many predecessors—from gothic fictions and forms, to Enlightenment debates about speech, to classical Greek models of conversation, to Romantic theories of the lyric, to the multinational history of sonneteering—and all feature a mix of canonical and less-well-remembered authors and texts. In something of a departure from past years, Dante Gabriel Rossetti features particularly prominently.</p> <p>Acknowledging that the “lineage connecting Romantic Gothic fiction with nineteenth-century poetry is not an obvious one” (p. 3), Olivia Loksing Moy’s <em>The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry</em> (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2022) nevertheless seeks to bridge the genealogical gap between fiction of the 1790s and poetry of the 1830s through 1880s by reconceiving “of Gothic through a new fundamental organizing principle: as a set of formal structures that configure the relationships between speakers and their imagined audiences” (p. 4). Neither “a conventional influence study . . . nor one that insists on ‘anticipation’” (p. 15), the book remains invested a familiar model of “formal influence” (p. 2), according to which “the looming figure of ‘Mother [Ann] Radcliffe’” (p. 19)—and, to a lesser extent, her contemporaries William Godwin, Matthew Lewis, and Mary Wollstonecraft—bequeath “structural positionings and patterns of confinement” that are ironically re-presented in the Victorian period as “a distinctive poetics of Gothic enclosure” (p. 7). Moy’s principal “structural positionings,” that is, forms, include “Gothic confinement,” “forced confessions,” “Gothic framing,” and “Gothic swaps,” the ironized iterations of which are collectively traced through selected poetry from Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter EBB), Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Emily Brontë (p. 7).</p> <p>This process begins in chapter 1, which pairs passages from <em>The Italian</em> (1796), <em>The Mysteries of Udolpho</em> (1794), and <em>The Monk</em> (1796) that feature <strong>[End Page 337]</strong> incidents of overhearing with examples of dramatic monologic confession “overheard” by readers of Robert Browning’s <em>Pippa Passes</em> (1841), “The Confessional” (1845), “The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (1842), “Andrea del Sarto” (1855), and “Mister Sludge, ‘The Medium’” (1864). On the strength of these examples, Moy asserts that the “Gothic thus provides a thematic, structural, and cultural framework to better understand Victorian dramatic monologues,” whether written by Browning or others (p. 78). Chapter 2 revisits R
{"title":"General Materials","authors":"Albert D. Pionke","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915654","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 --> General Materials <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Albert D. Pionke (bio) </li> </ul> <p>This year’s survey of general materials features four monographs and one substantial chapter from a broader genre history. All are committed to positioning Victorian poetry relative to its many predecessors—from gothic fictions and forms, to Enlightenment debates about speech, to classical Greek models of conversation, to Romantic theories of the lyric, to the multinational history of sonneteering—and all feature a mix of canonical and less-well-remembered authors and texts. In something of a departure from past years, Dante Gabriel Rossetti features particularly prominently.</p> <p>Acknowledging that the “lineage connecting Romantic Gothic fiction with nineteenth-century poetry is not an obvious one” (p. 3), Olivia Loksing Moy’s <em>The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry</em> (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2022) nevertheless seeks to bridge the genealogical gap between fiction of the 1790s and poetry of the 1830s through 1880s by reconceiving “of Gothic through a new fundamental organizing principle: as a set of formal structures that configure the relationships between speakers and their imagined audiences” (p. 4). Neither “a conventional influence study . . . nor one that insists on ‘anticipation’” (p. 15), the book remains invested a familiar model of “formal influence” (p. 2), according to which “the looming figure of ‘Mother [Ann] Radcliffe’” (p. 19)—and, to a lesser extent, her contemporaries William Godwin, Matthew Lewis, and Mary Wollstonecraft—bequeath “structural positionings and patterns of confinement” that are ironically re-presented in the Victorian period as “a distinctive poetics of Gothic enclosure” (p. 7). Moy’s principal “structural positionings,” that is, forms, include “Gothic confinement,” “forced confessions,” “Gothic framing,” and “Gothic swaps,” the ironized iterations of which are collectively traced through selected poetry from Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter EBB), Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Emily Brontë (p. 7).</p> <p>This process begins in chapter 1, which pairs passages from <em>The Italian</em> (1796), <em>The Mysteries of Udolpho</em> (1794), and <em>The Monk</em> (1796) that feature <strong>[End Page 337]</strong> incidents of overhearing with examples of dramatic monologic confession “overheard” by readers of Robert Browning’s <em>Pippa Passes</em> (1841), “The Confessional” (1845), “The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (1842), “Andrea del Sarto” (1855), and “Mister Sludge, ‘The Medium’” (1864). On the strength of these examples, Moy asserts that the “Gothic thus provides a thematic, structural, and cultural framework to better understand Victorian dramatic monologues,” whether written by Browning or others (p. 78). Chapter 2 revisits R","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"77 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138818115","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 --> Algernon Charles Swinburne <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Justin A. Sider (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In these pages, a little over a decade ago, Alan Young-Bryant joked aptly that Algernon Charles Swinburne was “the most neglected recovered poet of the period” (“Swinburne: ‘The Sweetest Name,’” <em>VP</em> 49, no. 3 [2011]: 301). He meant that our narrow vision of the poet stinted the sheer scope and variety of his writing. If steady work has somewhat remedied this situation, today the remark also seems apt in a different sense, as Swinburne occupies rather less of the field’s attention than he did a decade or so ago. Scholarship on Swinburne is slight this year, though the four publications range nicely over the poet’s verse forms, intellectual affiliations, critical reception, and relation to cultural history.</p> <p>In <em>Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth- Century English Poetry</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), Elizabeth K. Helsinger explores the sociable forms of conversational poetry—poems committed to the political and ethical work of responding to others, to “that which is not the self” (p. 3). A chapter on Robert Browning and Swinburne proposes that these poet are <strong>[End Page 404]</strong> interested in “conditions of conversational asymmetry” (p. 56), where one party exercises power over another. For Swinburne, these are the conditions of tyranny, the domination of priests, kings, and gods. Helsinger’s chapter brings welcome attention to Swinburne’s verse dramas and to the genre more generally. In verse dramas like <em>Atalanta in Calydon</em> (1865) and <em>Erectheus</em> (1876), she argues, “the web of speech and song binding characters and chorus constitutes the real dramatic action” (p. 58). The Greek choruses are crucial to the radical aesthetic of Swinburne’s verse dramas. They form a strikingly active “participating community” (p. 58) that at once draws in modern readers and widens the perspective of these plays beyond the purview of their doomed heroes and heroines.</p> <p>In <em>Atalanta</em>, both the central characters and the chorus suffer the cruel whims of the gods, but in the exchanges between them, they also create “a singing-together in which the participants realize . . . the laws of song’s prosody as a way of keeping company with each other.” This lyric community models a resistance to tyranny by imagining, in prosody itself, an order that “binds gods and men alike” (p. 63). <em>Erectheus</em> develops this project through its incorporation of odic form, making the interplay of strophe, antistrophe, and epode into a kind of conversation. In doing so, the play brings into community heroic characters, choral populace, and the readers themselves. These songs represent a shared effort at voicing human freedom in “a world of hostile forces” and tyrannical power (p. 69). Yet
以下是内容的简要摘录，以代替摘要： 阿尔杰农-查尔斯-斯温伯恩 Justin A. Sider（简历 十多年前，艾伦-扬-布赖恩特曾在本刊恰当地开玩笑说，阿尔杰农-查尔斯-斯温伯恩是 "这一时期最被忽视的复苏诗人"（"斯温伯恩：'最甜蜜的名字'"，《VP》49，第3期[2011]：301）。他的意思是说，我们对这位诗人的狭隘认识桎梏了他写作的广度和多样性。如果说扎实的工作在一定程度上弥补了这种状况，那么今天，这句话在另一种意义上似乎也是恰当的，因为斯温伯恩在这一领域的关注度远不如十几年前。今年有关斯温伯恩的研究成果不多，不过四部出版物的研究范围涵盖了诗人的诗歌形式、知识背景、评论界的接受程度以及与文化史的关系。在《诗歌对话》一书中：在《诗歌中的对话：十九世纪英国诗歌中的对话》（Conversation in Nineteenth- Century English Poetry）（剑桥：剑桥大学出版社，2022 年）一书中，Elizabeth K. Helsinger 探讨了对话诗歌的社交形式--致力于回应他人、回应 "非自我 "的政治和伦理工作的诗歌（第 3 页）。关于罗伯特-勃朗宁（Robert Browning）和斯温伯恩（Swinburne）的一章提出，这些诗人对 "对话不对称的条件"（第 56 页）感兴趣，即一方对另一方行使权力。在斯温伯恩看来，这些都是暴政的条件，是祭司、国王和神的统治。赫尔辛格在这一章中对斯温伯恩的诗剧以及更广泛的诗剧体裁给予了关注，值得欢迎。她认为，在《卡利登的阿塔兰塔》（Atalanta in Calydon，1865 年）和《埃罗特修斯》（Erectheus，1876 年）等诗剧中，"将人物和合唱团联系在一起的言语和歌声构成了真正的戏剧动作"（第 58 页）。希腊合唱团对于斯温伯恩诗剧的激进美学至关重要。他们形成了一个引人注目的活跃的 "参与群体"（第 58 页），既吸引了现代读者，又拓宽了这些戏剧的视角，使其超越了注定要失败的男女主人公的视野。在《阿塔兰特》中，中心人物和合唱团都遭受了诸神的残酷迫害，但在他们之间的交流中，他们也创造了 "一个共同歌唱的环境，在这个环境中，参与者认识到......歌曲的旋律规律是一种相互陪伴的方式"。这个抒情社区通过在旋律本身中想象出一种 "将神和人都联系在一起 "的秩序，从而成为反抗暴政的典范（第 63 页）。Erectheus》通过融入奥狄克形式发展了这一计划，使strophe、antistrophe和epode的相互作用成为一种对话。通过这种方式，该剧将英雄人物、合唱团的民众和读者本身带入了一个群体。这些歌曲代表了在 "充满敌对势力 "和专制权力的世界中表达人类自由的共同努力（第 69 页）。然而，斯温伯恩的诗歌本质上仍然是悲剧。正如赫尔辛格在讨论结束时所承认的，"这些以歌曲为媒介的交流并没有从根本上改变斯温伯恩对上帝主宰、暴政横行的世界中人类生活的悲观看法"（第 69 页）。凯瑟琳-麦克斯韦尔（Catherine Maxwell）的文章《斯温伯恩、帕特和奇异美的崇拜》（19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 34 [2023]: https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.8884）揭示了斯温伯恩与沃尔特-帕特之间错综复杂的个人关系和文学关系，以探讨他们对文学颓废的共同贡献。麦克斯韦通过对两位作家及其圈子的回忆录和书信的梳理，将他们在不同场合--醉醺醺地乘坐出租车、19 世纪 60 年代末在牛津大学帕特的房间里朗诵诗歌、19 世纪 70 年代末在埃德蒙-高斯家中聚会--联系在一起。虽然斯温伯恩在晚年淡化了与帕特的任何关系，帕特本人也相当沉默寡言，但他们的会面、礼物和朋友圈都表明，他们在个人和思想上有着相当程度的亲密关系。这种亲密关系在他们对 "奇异之美 "的共同追求中体现得淋漓尽致。正如马克斯韦尔指出的那样，这个短语和想法都要归功于波德莱尔的 "le beau est toujours bizarre"（"美丽总是奇特的"），但 [尾页 405]也要归功于珀西-比希-雪莱（Percy Bysshe Shelley）的坚持，即诗歌为 "最畸形的事物增添美丽"。麦克斯韦跟踪斯温伯恩的诗歌及其艺术写作的影响，尤其是他的《佛罗伦萨老大师设计笔记》（1868...
{"title":"Algernon Charles Swinburne","authors":"Justin A. Sider","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915660","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 --> Algernon Charles Swinburne <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Justin A. Sider (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In these pages, a little over a decade ago, Alan Young-Bryant joked aptly that Algernon Charles Swinburne was “the most neglected recovered poet of the period” (“Swinburne: ‘The Sweetest Name,’” <em>VP</em> 49, no. 3 [2011]: 301). He meant that our narrow vision of the poet stinted the sheer scope and variety of his writing. If steady work has somewhat remedied this situation, today the remark also seems apt in a different sense, as Swinburne occupies rather less of the field’s attention than he did a decade or so ago. Scholarship on Swinburne is slight this year, though the four publications range nicely over the poet’s verse forms, intellectual affiliations, critical reception, and relation to cultural history.</p> <p>In <em>Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth- Century English Poetry</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), Elizabeth K. Helsinger explores the sociable forms of conversational poetry—poems committed to the political and ethical work of responding to others, to “that which is not the self” (p. 3). A chapter on Robert Browning and Swinburne proposes that these poet are <strong>[End Page 404]</strong> interested in “conditions of conversational asymmetry” (p. 56), where one party exercises power over another. For Swinburne, these are the conditions of tyranny, the domination of priests, kings, and gods. Helsinger’s chapter brings welcome attention to Swinburne’s verse dramas and to the genre more generally. In verse dramas like <em>Atalanta in Calydon</em> (1865) and <em>Erectheus</em> (1876), she argues, “the web of speech and song binding characters and chorus constitutes the real dramatic action” (p. 58). The Greek choruses are crucial to the radical aesthetic of Swinburne’s verse dramas. They form a strikingly active “participating community” (p. 58) that at once draws in modern readers and widens the perspective of these plays beyond the purview of their doomed heroes and heroines.</p> <p>In <em>Atalanta</em>, both the central characters and the chorus suffer the cruel whims of the gods, but in the exchanges between them, they also create “a singing-together in which the participants realize . . . the laws of song’s prosody as a way of keeping company with each other.” This lyric community models a resistance to tyranny by imagining, in prosody itself, an order that “binds gods and men alike” (p. 63). <em>Erectheus</em> develops this project through its incorporation of odic form, making the interplay of strophe, antistrophe, and epode into a kind of conversation. In doing so, the play brings into community heroic characters, choral populace, and the readers themselves. These songs represent a shared effort at voicing human freedom in “a world of hostile forces” and tyrannical power (p. 69). Yet ","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138817829","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 --> Dante Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism, and the Morris Circle <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Florence Boos (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Dante G. Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism</h2> <p>The year 2022 was a banner year for articles placing Dante Rossetti’s poetry in relation to the sister arts of music and painting. Several of these have been conveniently gathered in a special issue of the <em>Journal of Victorian Culture</em> (27, no. 2 [2022]), with an introduction by Michael Allis. In his “Roundtable: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Music: Introduction,” Allis lists more than a dozen settings of Rossetti’s poems by composers from 1893 to 1928, including Claude Debussy’s <em>La damoiselle élue</em>, Wilberfoss Owst’s “The White Ship,” and Vaughan Williams’s song sequence <em>The House of Life</em>. He argues that musical imagery is pervasive throughout Rossetti’s art and poetry, as critics have identified its lack of temporality and heightened sensuality with late-century aestheticism, noted the presence of exotic instruments throughout his paintings, and identified the sonorous repetitions of his lines and phrases as inherently musical. Observing that Rossetti’s oeuvre, and music itself, is inherently interdisciplinary, Allis concludes with the hope that an understanding of the musical aspects of Rossetti’s practice will further the exploration of music’s contribution to “the rich interdisciplinary potential of Victorian studies in general” (p. 186).</p> <p>The succeeding articles confirm this promise. In “Blessed Damozel(s): Ekphrastic Perspectives on Rossetti’s Poem and Painting,” George Kennasay suggests that although many artistic works of the past depict music, “the traffic is not equal” (p. 187), and fewer poems are represented in graphic art or, until the twentieth century, have inspired paintings also interpreted in music. After reviewing the title poem’s revision history (there were four versions) and contemporary reception, he notes artistic renderings by Edward Burne-Jones and Byam Shaw (Kennasay describes the latter’s 1906 illustrations as “both gaudy and banal,” p. 190), then explores Rossetti’s two paintings of the subject in 1877 and 1881 (the latter still in process shortly before his death). Both paintings thus belong to a later phase of Pre-Raphaelite art, “placing more emphasis on imagined ideas than on naturalism—an aesthetic that shades into symbolism” (p. 191); moreover, the poem’s use of concrete detail in a context of unstructured space and temporal ambiguity is a poetic equivalent of “the clear <strong>[End Page 389]</strong> physical detail of the painting . . . combined with its relative lack of perspective” (p. 192).</p> <p>At this point Kennasay turns to the many musical settings of the poem, ranging from the now-lost 1886 score of Orton Bradley and Claude Debussy’s still-performed 1888 <em>La damoiselle èlue</em> t
{"title":"Dante Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism, and the Morris Circle","authors":"Florence Boos","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915659","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 --> Dante Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism, and the Morris Circle <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Florence Boos (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Dante G. Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism</h2> <p>The year 2022 was a banner year for articles placing Dante Rossetti’s poetry in relation to the sister arts of music and painting. Several of these have been conveniently gathered in a special issue of the <em>Journal of Victorian Culture</em> (27, no. 2 [2022]), with an introduction by Michael Allis. In his “Roundtable: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Music: Introduction,” Allis lists more than a dozen settings of Rossetti’s poems by composers from 1893 to 1928, including Claude Debussy’s <em>La damoiselle élue</em>, Wilberfoss Owst’s “The White Ship,” and Vaughan Williams’s song sequence <em>The House of Life</em>. He argues that musical imagery is pervasive throughout Rossetti’s art and poetry, as critics have identified its lack of temporality and heightened sensuality with late-century aestheticism, noted the presence of exotic instruments throughout his paintings, and identified the sonorous repetitions of his lines and phrases as inherently musical. Observing that Rossetti’s oeuvre, and music itself, is inherently interdisciplinary, Allis concludes with the hope that an understanding of the musical aspects of Rossetti’s practice will further the exploration of music’s contribution to “the rich interdisciplinary potential of Victorian studies in general” (p. 186).</p> <p>The succeeding articles confirm this promise. In “Blessed Damozel(s): Ekphrastic Perspectives on Rossetti’s Poem and Painting,” George Kennasay suggests that although many artistic works of the past depict music, “the traffic is not equal” (p. 187), and fewer poems are represented in graphic art or, until the twentieth century, have inspired paintings also interpreted in music. After reviewing the title poem’s revision history (there were four versions) and contemporary reception, he notes artistic renderings by Edward Burne-Jones and Byam Shaw (Kennasay describes the latter’s 1906 illustrations as “both gaudy and banal,” p. 190), then explores Rossetti’s two paintings of the subject in 1877 and 1881 (the latter still in process shortly before his death). Both paintings thus belong to a later phase of Pre-Raphaelite art, “placing more emphasis on imagined ideas than on naturalism—an aesthetic that shades into symbolism” (p. 191); moreover, the poem’s use of concrete detail in a context of unstructured space and temporal ambiguity is a poetic equivalent of “the clear <strong>[End Page 389]</strong> physical detail of the painting . . . combined with its relative lack of perspective” (p. 192).</p> <p>At this point Kennasay turns to the many musical settings of the poem, ranging from the now-lost 1886 score of Orton Bradley and Claude Debussy’s still-performed 1888 <em>La damoiselle èlue</em> t","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138817709","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 Women Poets <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Heather Bozant Witcher (bio) </li> </ul> <p>What does it mean to read, analyze, and interpret poetry at varying scales? In 2018, Natalie Houston showed how humanities research problematizes questions of scale and noted that “[f]or Victorian studies, the problems of innumerable things and how to interpret them manifest doubly as a historical phenomenon and a contemporary methodological challenge” (<em>Victorian Literature and Culture</em> 46, no. 3–4 (2018): 848–851, p. 848). Then, Houston argued that the digital invigorated our engagement with scale; now, in 2022, scholarship demonstrates that calls to “undiscipline” the field has revitalized conceptions of poetic scale and influence in the realm of women poets. This has meant more than simply considering global connections and bringing peripheral voices to the center. It has for studies of Victorian women poets meant asking new questions about familiar concepts, like the Poetess and lyric, to embrace new visions of poetry as social, multiple, and radical.</p> <p>Looking backward, Elizabeth Helsinger’s latest monograph, <em>Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth Century English Verse</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022) considers the rich inheritance of late eighteenth-century verse conversation upon Victorian forms to trace a different view of lyric history that incorporates the public, social world and a desire for reciprocity. In doing so, Helsinger also provocatively questions the implications for conversation in a twenty-first-century world marred by a global pandemic and growing political distrust. In the poems analyzed, conversations are events: either an event referred to within the poem or as a readerly experience. Helsinger thus contributes to the growing body of scholarship viewing poetry as a “social, and sociable, form” (p. 7). Although the majority of poets explored by Helsinger are canonically male (Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert Browning, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, among others), two chapters explore the conversational poetry of Christina Rossetti and Michael Field. Exploring the ekphrastic poetry of Michael Field, Helsinger interrogates the <strong>[End Page 417]</strong> encounter with visual art and “commodity relations” to repersonalize objects into something like conversation. Examining Rossetti’s ballads, Helsinger foregrounds Rossetti’s reworking of the eighteenth-century ballad tradition and its reliance on conversation. Rossetti’s spiritual dialogues imagine conversations that are at once promising and spiritually fulfilling: the anticipatory voice of God responds in the circular repetition of reciprocative poetic forms. Helsinger’s thoughtful close prosodic readings of these women poets offers new interpretations for situating Victorian poetry within a sociab
以下是内容的简要摘录，以代替摘要： 维多利亚时代女诗人希瑟-博赞特-威彻（简历） 在不同尺度上阅读、分析和解读诗歌意味着什么？2018 年，娜塔莉-休斯顿（Natalie Houston）展示了人文学科研究如何将规模问题问题化，并指出 "对于维多利亚时期的研究而言，无数事物的问题以及如何解释这些事物的问题双重体现了历史现象和当代方法论的挑战"（Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no.3-4 (2018):848-851, p. 848).当时，休斯顿认为数字技术为我们与规模的互动注入了活力；如今，在2022年，学术研究表明，"非学科化 "领域的呼声重振了女诗人领域的诗歌规模和影响力概念。这不仅仅意味着考虑全球联系和将外围的声音带到中心。对于维多利亚时期女诗人的研究而言，这意味着要对女诗人和抒情诗等熟悉的概念提出新的问题，以接受诗歌作为社会性、多重性和激进性的新视角。伊丽莎白-赫尔辛格（Elizabeth Helsinger）的最新专著《诗歌中的对话》（Conversing in Verse：剑桥：剑桥大学出版社，2022 年）考虑了 18 世纪晚期诗歌对话对维多利亚时期形式的丰富继承，追溯了一种不同的抒情历史观，其中包含了公共、社会世界和对互惠的渴望。在此过程中，赫尔辛格还提出了一个具有启发性的问题，即在全球流行病肆虐、政治不信任日益加剧的二十一世纪，对话的意义何在。在所分析的诗歌中，对话就是事件：要么是诗歌中提到的事件，要么是读者的体验。因此，将诗歌视为 "社会和交际形式"（第 7 页）的学者越来越多。尽管赫尔辛格探讨的大多数诗人都是典型的男性（阿尔弗雷德-丁尼生、但丁-加布里埃尔-罗塞蒂、罗伯特-勃朗宁和阿尔吉侬-查尔斯-斯温伯恩等），但有两章探讨了克里斯蒂娜-罗塞蒂和迈克尔-菲尔德的会话诗歌。在探讨迈克尔-菲尔德的咏物诗时，赫尔辛格审视了与视觉艺术和 "商品关系 "的[尾页 417]接触，将对象重新人格化为类似对话的东西。在研究罗塞蒂的民谣时，赫尔辛格强调了罗塞蒂对十八世纪民谣传统的再创作及其对对话的依赖。罗塞蒂的心灵对话所想象的对话既充满希望，又在精神上得到满足：上帝期待的声音在互惠诗歌形式的循环重复中做出回应。赫尔辛格对这些女诗人进行了深思熟虑的贴近式韵律解读，为维多利亚时期诗歌的社会性和参与性提供了新的诠释：诗歌是用来做事的；诗歌是积极的；诗歌是有回应的。在 "女诗人 "领域之外，有关工人阶级诗人的重要作品仍在不断被发掘和分析--至少就这些诗人的名字而言是如此。由于弗洛伦斯-布斯（Florence Boos）、马库斯-怀特（Marcus Waithe）和迈克尔-桑德斯（Michael Sanders）等人的不懈努力，对维多利亚时期工人阶级诗人的探索已不是什么新鲜事；然而，今年对兰开夏郡棉花饥荒时期所写诗歌的关注，让我们深入了解了跨大西洋关系的复杂性，汇集了最近从期刊中恢复并继续检索的大量诗歌，并对诗歌的功能及其拷问劳动定义的能力提出了质疑。Simon Rennie 的"[重新]形成棉花饥荒诗歌--一些启示"（Journal of Victorian Culture 27, no.在讨论中，雷尼指出了他的项目团队所使用的数字方法是如何扩展棉花饥荒诗歌传统的地理、时间和阶级界限并使之问题化的，从而揭示了废奴政治和移民修辞学在全球范围内的交集。重要的是，雷尼的数据库《兰开夏棉花饥荒诗歌（1861-5 年）》（https://cottonfaminepoetry.exeter.ac.uk/）模糊了工人阶级的定义："我相信，该项目已经恢复了劳动人民的声音；只是在许多情况下，我无法将这些作者个人认定为'工人阶级'。我开始越来越多地将这些作家统称为'普通人'"（第 156 页）。讨论揭示了在无法识别单个作者的情况下建立数据库的有趣而又令人沮丧的方面。Eva Dema...
{"title":"Victorian Women Poets","authors":"Heather Bozant Witcher","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a915662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a915662","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 Women Poets <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Heather Bozant Witcher (bio) </li> </ul> <p>What does it mean to read, analyze, and interpret poetry at varying scales? In 2018, Natalie Houston showed how humanities research problematizes questions of scale and noted that “[f]or Victorian studies, the problems of innumerable things and how to interpret them manifest doubly as a historical phenomenon and a contemporary methodological challenge” (<em>Victorian Literature and Culture</em> 46, no. 3–4 (2018): 848–851, p. 848). Then, Houston argued that the digital invigorated our engagement with scale; now, in 2022, scholarship demonstrates that calls to “undiscipline” the field has revitalized conceptions of poetic scale and influence in the realm of women poets. This has meant more than simply considering global connections and bringing peripheral voices to the center. It has for studies of Victorian women poets meant asking new questions about familiar concepts, like the Poetess and lyric, to embrace new visions of poetry as social, multiple, and radical.</p> <p>Looking backward, Elizabeth Helsinger’s latest monograph, <em>Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth Century English Verse</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022) considers the rich inheritance of late eighteenth-century verse conversation upon Victorian forms to trace a different view of lyric history that incorporates the public, social world and a desire for reciprocity. In doing so, Helsinger also provocatively questions the implications for conversation in a twenty-first-century world marred by a global pandemic and growing political distrust. In the poems analyzed, conversations are events: either an event referred to within the poem or as a readerly experience. Helsinger thus contributes to the growing body of scholarship viewing poetry as a “social, and sociable, form” (p. 7). Although the majority of poets explored by Helsinger are canonically male (Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert Browning, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, among others), two chapters explore the conversational poetry of Christina Rossetti and Michael Field. Exploring the ekphrastic poetry of Michael Field, Helsinger interrogates the <strong>[End Page 417]</strong> encounter with visual art and “commodity relations” to repersonalize objects into something like conversation. Examining Rossetti’s ballads, Helsinger foregrounds Rossetti’s reworking of the eighteenth-century ballad tradition and its reliance on conversation. Rossetti’s spiritual dialogues imagine conversations that are at once promising and spiritually fulfilling: the anticipatory voice of God responds in the circular repetition of reciprocative poetic forms. Helsinger’s thoughtful close prosodic readings of these women poets offers new interpretations for situating Victorian poetry within a sociab","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138821619","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}
Going Back and Going On: The Uses of Re-encounter Dominique Gracia (bio) and Fergus McGhee (bio) The world,” wrote Robert Browning, “is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned.”1 Browning’s words insist on the enduring interest of the disowned objects of our encounters, but they also hint at the value of re- encounter itself: in his “Essay on Shelley” (1852), he urges his readers to repeated engagement with a world which— forlornly, conceitedly, at any rate unimaginatively— they think they know all too well. Browning’s point has lost nothing of its force to the passage of time, but it is still worth wondering why a Victorian audience in particular needed to hear it, and why it should have been a poet that made it. One of the things that distinguishes re- encounter from other varieties of repetition is its grounding in first- person experience, and hence its self- conscious temporal relation to past and prospective engagements with the same object: be it a person, place, thing, idea, or (as Browning’s metaphor suggests) a text. As such it may carry significant ethical implications, which might involve coming to see the world (and its constituents) as neither fully knowable nor casually disposable, and one’s own experience as vitally provisional. A re- encounter, to borrow a suggestive pairing of Stanley Cavell’s, is a way of both going back and going on.2 As the essays that follow reveal, there are many possible moods, styles, and methods of re- encounter. This special issue explores both how re- encounters are represented in Victorian poems and how structures of re- encounter shape the composition and reception of poetry in the period— through the dynamics of literary influence, the translation of earlier texts, the revision of manuscripts, and the creative reconstruction of tropes, myths, and images. Unsurprisingly, then, our chosen term often brushes up against others that bear certain family resemblances, including: representation, remediation, refashioning, recounting, revising, revisiting, revisioning, and recursion.3 Such attention lends weight to Rita Felski’s recent observation that “we shortchange the significance of art by focusing on the ‘de’ prefix (its power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the ‘re’ prefix: its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception.” 4 Our contributors offer us many different routes into the concept of re- encounter as a resource for thinking about [End Page 133] Victorian poetry and culture. While we have not been prescriptive about its definition, we nonetheless want to make a case for carefully scrutinizing our critical terms: all the following essays think hard about what makes “re- encounter” distinctive, as a structure of experience and as a critical idiom. An example from one of the most well- known poems of the period gives a sense of the stakes and possibilities. Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) pursues a re- encounter with a
“世界，”罗伯特·布朗宁写道，“不是用来学习和抛弃的，而是用来回归和重新学习的。”勃朗宁的话强调了我们对遭遇中被抛弃的对象的持久兴趣，但它们也暗示了再遭遇本身的价值:在他的《论雪莱》(1852)中，他敦促读者反复参与一个世界，一个他们孤独地、自负地、至少是缺乏想象力地认为自己太了解的世界。随着时间的流逝，勃朗宁的观点并没有失去它的力量，但我们仍然值得思考，为什么维多利亚时代的观众特别需要听到它，为什么它应该是一位诗人提出的。再相遇与其他类型的重复的区别之一是它建立在第一人称经验的基础上，因此它与过去和未来与同一对象的接触有自我意识的时间关系:无论是一个人、一个地方、一件事、一个想法，还是(如布朗宁的隐喻所暗示的)一篇文章。因此，它可能具有重要的伦理意义，这可能涉及到将世界(及其组成部分)视为既不完全可知也不随意丢弃，并且将自己的经验视为至关重要的临时。借用斯坦利·卡维尔(Stanley Cavell)暗示性的配对，重新相遇是一种既回到过去又继续前进的方式正如下面的文章所揭示的那样，有许多可能的情绪、风格和方法来重新相遇。本期特刊探讨了维多利亚时代诗歌中如何再现再现，以及再现的结构如何通过文学影响的动态、早期文本的翻译、手稿的修订以及对比喻、神话和图像的创造性重建，塑造了这一时期诗歌的构成和接受。不出所料，我们选择的术语经常与其他具有某些相似之处的术语擦除，包括:代表，补救，重新塑造，重新叙述，修订，重新访问，修订和递归这种关注为丽塔·费尔斯基(Rita Felski)最近的观察提供了支持，她说:“我们通过关注‘de’前缀(其去神秘化、不稳定、变性的力量)而忽略了‘re’前缀:其重新情境化、重新配置或重新充电感知的能力，从而低估了艺术的重要性。”4我们的撰稿人为我们提供了许多不同的途径，让我们了解作为思考维多利亚时代诗歌和文化资源的“再相遇”概念。虽然我们还没有对它的定义做出规定，但我们仍然想要仔细审查我们的批评术语:以下所有文章都在努力思考是什么让“重新相遇”作为一种经验结构和一种批评成语而与众不同。从这一时期最著名的一首诗中可以看出其中的利害关系和可能性。丁尼生的悼念a . h . h(1850)追求重新遇到一个神圣的地方,记忆当诗人回到亚瑟·哈勒姆Wimpole街的房子:黑暗的房子,再一次的我站在这里长期讨人嫌的街,门,我的心曾经beatSo快,等待一只手,一只手可握着不再看我,因为我不能睡眠,就像一个有罪我creepAt door.5最早的早晨丁尼生的抒情诗的句法在审视和称呼重新遇到的物理对象之间含糊不清:黑暗的房子和它的铁门。“看我”可以被理解为指示性的(以房子和门作为句子的主语)，但它听起来更像是一个地址，其目标受众可能是读者，或哈勒姆，甚至房子本身，沿着经典的“副lalausithyron”体裁的路线(在这种体裁中，被排斥的情人“向门讲话，并认为这是他被拒绝的原因”)在最后一种情况下，房子的不回应成为一个可怕的数字，因为诗人对他死去的朋友的演讲失败了。虽然哈勒姆的阴暗住所似乎与哀悼的色彩有共鸣，但诗人发现自己被它的空虚所困扰:不仅是它的空虚……
{"title":"Going Back and Going On: The Uses of Re-encounter","authors":"Dominique Gracia, Fergus McGhee","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a907676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a907676","url":null,"abstract":"Going Back and Going On: The Uses of Re-encounter Dominique Gracia (bio) and Fergus McGhee (bio) The world,” wrote Robert Browning, “is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned.”1 Browning’s words insist on the enduring interest of the disowned objects of our encounters, but they also hint at the value of re- encounter itself: in his “Essay on Shelley” (1852), he urges his readers to repeated engagement with a world which— forlornly, conceitedly, at any rate unimaginatively— they think they know all too well. Browning’s point has lost nothing of its force to the passage of time, but it is still worth wondering why a Victorian audience in particular needed to hear it, and why it should have been a poet that made it. One of the things that distinguishes re- encounter from other varieties of repetition is its grounding in first- person experience, and hence its self- conscious temporal relation to past and prospective engagements with the same object: be it a person, place, thing, idea, or (as Browning’s metaphor suggests) a text. As such it may carry significant ethical implications, which might involve coming to see the world (and its constituents) as neither fully knowable nor casually disposable, and one’s own experience as vitally provisional. A re- encounter, to borrow a suggestive pairing of Stanley Cavell’s, is a way of both going back and going on.2 As the essays that follow reveal, there are many possible moods, styles, and methods of re- encounter. This special issue explores both how re- encounters are represented in Victorian poems and how structures of re- encounter shape the composition and reception of poetry in the period— through the dynamics of literary influence, the translation of earlier texts, the revision of manuscripts, and the creative reconstruction of tropes, myths, and images. Unsurprisingly, then, our chosen term often brushes up against others that bear certain family resemblances, including: representation, remediation, refashioning, recounting, revising, revisiting, revisioning, and recursion.3 Such attention lends weight to Rita Felski’s recent observation that “we shortchange the significance of art by focusing on the ‘de’ prefix (its power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the ‘re’ prefix: its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception.” 4 Our contributors offer us many different routes into the concept of re- encounter as a resource for thinking about [End Page 133] Victorian poetry and culture. While we have not been prescriptive about its definition, we nonetheless want to make a case for carefully scrutinizing our critical terms: all the following essays think hard about what makes “re- encounter” distinctive, as a structure of experience and as a critical idiom. An example from one of the most well- known poems of the period gives a sense of the stakes and possibilities. Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) pursues a re- encounter with a","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135142628","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}
On Peacocks: Feathered Re-encounters in the 1890s Mark Llewellyn (bio) Introduction: Devouring the Bird In January 1914, a group of modernists, including William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, ate a peacock at an honorary dinner for the Victorian poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt. As recounted in Lucy McDiarmid’s Poets & the Peacock Dinner (2014), this feast represented an important moment in poetic history on the cusp of the First World War, although, as McDiarmid explores, there was some confusion and miscommunication between the generations of poets at the feast.1 The peacock as an influence in need of killing off, either via eating or other forms of cultural consumption, also inflects a novel almost contemporaneous with the peacock dinner: D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock (1911). More explicitly than the dinner for Blunt, Lawrence’s novel utilizes imagery, poetics, and visual culture from the Victorian period, specifically the 1890s and the work of Aubrey Beardsley, to slay various traditional attitudes about the role of art and to argue for a more fluid interpretation of gender and sexuality. Despite the title of Lawrence’s novel, relatively little attention has been paid to its allusion to earlier authors. Nor has much attention been paid to the gendered ambiguity of the peacock, yet, as Kristin Morrison describes it, “[t]he problematic element” is “not the peacock itself— a traditional symbol of vanity— but its female association and its whiteness.”2 Although Morrison’s essay draws on Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) and Beardsley’s illustrations for the play (1894) to account for both the femininity and the whiteness in Lawrence’s title, there is no attempt to uncover the sources or motifs of Wilde’s own white peacock. Indeed, in the reliance on the Beardsley illustrations, one can overlook the significance of that white peacock in Wilde’s work and the decadent period more broadly. While Lawrence’s text is indebted to how Wilde and Beardsley “establish[ed] the white-peacock-woman as decadent, possessive, and deadly” and the “sexual ambiguity” in Wilde’s drama, this leads to a question about where Wilde himself encountered the figure of the white peacock, the role it plays in his own work, and what that source might tell us about Wilde’s own revisioning of an earlier poetic motif (Morrison, pp. 247, 242). [End Page 225] This essay is therefore concerned not with the legacy of a particular dinner in 1914 or Lawrence’s revisioning of the 1890s but rather with looking backward from that early twentieth-century moment of literal and meta phorical peacock slaying to the poetry and culture of the fin de siècle in order to understand a longer chain of re-encounter. Specifically, my concern is with the ways in which the decadent poets of the 1880s and 1890s used the peacock motif to re-envision Victorian poetic tropes of the midcentury. The approach here, then, stages multiple sites of re-encounter, tracing a lineage from the peacocks of the 1840s–1870s in the
1914年1月，一群现代主义者，包括威廉·巴特勒·叶芝和埃兹拉·庞德，在为维多利亚时代诗人威尔弗雷德·斯考文·布朗特举行的荣誉晚宴上，吃了一只孔雀。正如露西·麦克迪亚米德(Lucy McDiarmid)在《诗人与孔雀晚宴》(Poets & the Peacock Dinner, 2014)中所述，这场盛宴代表了第一次世界大战前夕诗歌历史上的一个重要时刻，尽管正如麦克迪亚米德(McDiarmid)所探究的那样，在宴会上的几代诗人之间存在一些困惑和误解孔雀作为一种需要被消灭的影响力，无论是通过饮食还是其他形式的文化消费，也影响了一部几乎与孔雀晚餐同时代的小说:d·h·劳伦斯的《白孔雀》(1911)。劳伦斯的小说比布朗特的晚餐更明确地利用了维多利亚时期的意象、诗学和视觉文化，特别是19世纪90年代和奥布里·比尔兹利的作品，打破了关于艺术角色的各种传统态度，并主张对性别和性行为进行更流畅的解释。尽管劳伦斯的小说的标题，相对较少的注意，它的暗指早期作家。人们也很少关注孔雀的性别歧义，然而，正如克里斯汀·莫里森(Kristin Morrison)所描述的那样，“有问题的因素”“不是孔雀本身——一个传统的虚荣象征——而是它与女性的联系和它的白色。”尽管莫里森的文章借鉴了奥斯卡·王尔德的《莎乐美》(1893)和比尔兹利为这部戏剧绘制的插图(1894)来解释劳伦斯标题中的女性气质和白色，但并没有试图揭示王尔德自己的白孔雀的来源或主题。的确，在对比尔兹利插图的依赖中，人们可以忽略那只白孔雀在王尔德作品和更广泛的颓废时期中的重要性。虽然劳伦斯的文本感谢王尔德和比尔兹利如何“将白孔雀女人塑造成颓败的、占有的、致命的”，以及王尔德戏剧中的“性模糊”，但这导致了一个问题:王尔德自己在哪里遇到白孔雀的形象，它在他自己的作品中扮演的角色，以及这一来源可能告诉我们王尔德自己对早期诗歌母题的修改(莫里森，第244,242页)。因此，这篇文章关注的不是1914年的一场特殊晚餐的遗产，也不是劳伦斯对19世纪90年代的修订，而是从20世纪初的文字和元历史上的孔雀杀戮时刻回顾到最后一刻的诗歌和文化，以便理解更长的再相遇链。具体来说，我关注的是19世纪80年代和90年代的颓废诗人如何使用孔雀主题来重新想象20世纪中叶维多利亚时代的诗歌修辞。因此，本书的研究方法是在多个地点进行重新相遇，从19世纪40年代至70年代阿尔弗雷德、丁尼生勋爵、克里斯蒂娜·罗塞蒂和杰拉德·曼利·霍普金斯的作品中追踪孔雀的血统，在围绕查尔斯·达尔文和约翰·罗斯金的理论进行的同时代科学和美学辩论中，将其置于背景中，然后将重点放在王尔德和奥利弗·科斯坦斯的《最后的结局》中的孔雀文本上。我认为，连接这些重新相遇的是一种关于孔雀作为主题的模糊性，包括性别和性的问题，描绘的色情和异国情调，最重要的是，再现和重新构想白孔雀背后的意义。王尔德的重新相遇特别地将他对丁尼森孔雀的关注置于19世纪90年代的一种技巧和过度的美学中。在最近颓废主义研究转向自然和自然在颓废主义思想中的作用的背景下，我建议，像孔雀的适应性重新相遇这样精确的观察，既提供了对广泛主题的切实考虑，又以文化敬意和挪用的形式为基础。在这方面，这篇文章促成了一个更广泛的讨论，即自然世界如何在颓废中受到越来越密切的审视……
{"title":"On Peacocks: Feathered Re-encounters in the 1890s","authors":"Mark Llewellyn","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a907681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a907681","url":null,"abstract":"On Peacocks: Feathered Re-encounters in the 1890s Mark Llewellyn (bio) Introduction: Devouring the Bird In January 1914, a group of modernists, including William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, ate a peacock at an honorary dinner for the Victorian poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt. As recounted in Lucy McDiarmid’s Poets & the Peacock Dinner (2014), this feast represented an important moment in poetic history on the cusp of the First World War, although, as McDiarmid explores, there was some confusion and miscommunication between the generations of poets at the feast.1 The peacock as an influence in need of killing off, either via eating or other forms of cultural consumption, also inflects a novel almost contemporaneous with the peacock dinner: D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock (1911). More explicitly than the dinner for Blunt, Lawrence’s novel utilizes imagery, poetics, and visual culture from the Victorian period, specifically the 1890s and the work of Aubrey Beardsley, to slay various traditional attitudes about the role of art and to argue for a more fluid interpretation of gender and sexuality. Despite the title of Lawrence’s novel, relatively little attention has been paid to its allusion to earlier authors. Nor has much attention been paid to the gendered ambiguity of the peacock, yet, as Kristin Morrison describes it, “[t]he problematic element” is “not the peacock itself— a traditional symbol of vanity— but its female association and its whiteness.”2 Although Morrison’s essay draws on Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) and Beardsley’s illustrations for the play (1894) to account for both the femininity and the whiteness in Lawrence’s title, there is no attempt to uncover the sources or motifs of Wilde’s own white peacock. Indeed, in the reliance on the Beardsley illustrations, one can overlook the significance of that white peacock in Wilde’s work and the decadent period more broadly. While Lawrence’s text is indebted to how Wilde and Beardsley “establish[ed] the white-peacock-woman as decadent, possessive, and deadly” and the “sexual ambiguity” in Wilde’s drama, this leads to a question about where Wilde himself encountered the figure of the white peacock, the role it plays in his own work, and what that source might tell us about Wilde’s own revisioning of an earlier poetic motif (Morrison, pp. 247, 242). [End Page 225] This essay is therefore concerned not with the legacy of a particular dinner in 1914 or Lawrence’s revisioning of the 1890s but rather with looking backward from that early twentieth-century moment of literal and meta phorical peacock slaying to the poetry and culture of the fin de siècle in order to understand a longer chain of re-encounter. Specifically, my concern is with the ways in which the decadent poets of the 1880s and 1890s used the peacock motif to re-envision Victorian poetic tropes of the midcentury. The approach here, then, stages multiple sites of re-encounter, tracing a lineage from the peacocks of the 1840s–1870s in the","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135142626","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}
Christ Among the Decadents: Re-encountering Religion in Edwin Arnold’s The Light of the World Joshua Brorby (bio) In 1879, Edwin Arnold completed the poem that would make him famous, his epic life of Gau ta ma Bud dha, The Light of Asia. Published in over thirty editions in the first six years of its existence, Arnold’s bestseller constitutes a model entry in two related Victorian genres: the orientalist free translation and the comparative religious primer.1 The former genre has as its most well-known representative The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1888) by Richard Francis Burton, while the latter reached its apogee with F. Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East (1879–1910). Both genres represent a re-encounter on the part of the author with an extant text in a foreign language, but for the audience they were often original reading experiences. Arnold, too, made his name by introducing unfamiliar religious traditions to English readers: in addition to epicizing the life of Buddha in The Light of Asia (1879), he enumerated the names of Allah in Pearls of the Faith (1883) and translated the Bhagavad Gita in his The Song Celestial (1885). The same cannot be said of the epic life of Christ he produced in 1891.2 Given that its readers might be expected to “know what is in the book before they open it,” as one reviewer put it at the time, The Light of the World was seen by Arnold’s contemporaries as a “missed . . . opportunity”; as Christopher Clausen has observed, it “fell dead from the press.”3 The work’s failure had to do with the fact that the epic did not adhere to either of the generic types with which Arnold had made his name, offering neither a fresh translation nor instruction in unfamiliar religious doctrine. It dwelled on the story Victorian readers knew better than any other, and in that spirit, it belongs decidedly to the realm of re-encounter. Critically reading Arnold’s epic of Christ with mid-Victorian religious controversies in mind might confirm now axiomatic observations about the period’s literary-religious culture: that it was populated by writers reimagining [End Page 143] the life of Christ for a readership acquainted with German higher criticism and Ernest Renan, the French scholar whose Vie de Jésus (1863) expunged biblical miracles to depict Christ as a historical figure.4 Likewise, reading for the specifically Buddhist presence in The Light of the World would reinforce convincing arguments identifying the Gautama Buddha as a crucial Victorian analog, and forerunner, of Christ.5 If encountered, however, alongside the emerging decadents rising to prominence as the star of Tennyson and his generation waned, The Light of the World is a much more interesting flop— one that attempts to reconcile its earnest comparative religious perspective with the hallmarks of a poetics that imagined the modern in decay. Exploring in Arnold’s “signal failure” the border between worlds seen and unseen, finite and infinite, shows how th
1879年，埃德温·阿诺德完成了一首使他成名的诗，他的史诗般的高塔马巴德哈的生活，《亚洲之光》。阿诺德的这本畅销书在问世的头六年里就出版了三十多个版本，它构成了维多利亚时代两种相关类型的典范:东方主义意译和比较宗教入门前者最著名的代表是理查德·弗朗西斯·伯顿的《千夜一夜》(1888)，而后者则以f·马克斯·米勒的《东方圣书》(1879-1910)达到顶峰。这两种类型都代表了作者用外语与现存文本的重新相遇，但对读者来说，它们往往是原创的阅读体验。阿诺德也因向英国读者介绍不熟悉的宗教传统而出名:除了在《亚洲之光》(1879)中歌颂佛陀的一生外，他还在《信仰的珍珠》(1883)中列举了安拉的名字，并在《天歌》(1885)中翻译了《博伽梵歌》。他在1891年创作的基督史诗般的生活就不一样了。正如一位评论家当时所说的那样，读者可能希望“在打开书之前就知道书里有什么”，《世界之光》被阿诺德同时代的人视为“错过的……”机会”;正如克里斯托弗•克劳森(Christopher Clausen)所言，它“从媒体上消失了”。这部作品的失败与下述事实有关:这部史诗既没有遵循阿诺德赖以成名的两种一般类型，既没有提供新鲜的翻译，也没有提供不熟悉的宗教教义的指导。它详述了维多利亚时代的读者最了解的故事，在这种精神下，它绝对属于重新相遇的领域。带着维多利亚时代中期的宗教争议来批判性地阅读阿诺德的基督史诗，现在可能会证实关于这一时期文学宗教文化的不证自明的观察:它是由作家们为熟悉德国高等批评和法国学者欧内斯特·勒南(Ernest Renan)的读者重新想象基督的生活所组成的，他的Vie de j(1863)删掉了圣经的奇迹，把基督描绘成一个历史人物同样地，在《世界之光》中阅读佛教的身影，将会加强令人信服的论点，将乔达摩佛确定为维多利亚时代的重要类比，基督的先驱。然而，如果遇到，随着丁尼生和他那一代的明星逐渐衰落，新兴的颓废主义者也开始崭露头角，《世界之光》是一个更有趣的失败之作——它试图调和其真诚的比较宗教观点与一种想象现代衰落的诗学特征。在阿诺德的“信号失败”中探索可见世界与不可见世界、有限世界与无限世界之间的边界，显示了维多利亚时代一些比较主义者的时间和物质主义焦虑是如何与他们反传统的颓废的同时代人的类似不安相一致的我想研究这部史诗，不是作为诗人对他自己早期更成功的作品的回应(把基督的史诗简化为“撤回”和“palinode”)，而是作为一个在多信仰背景下代表化身悖论的实验——通过后来被亚瑟·西蒙斯(Arthur simmons)编著的颓废美学。结合了对感官极限的颓废兴趣以及比较宗教文本作者对时间和物质性的思考方式。马克·奈特提醒我们，基督教迄今为止是“颓废派的主要宗教传统，尽管他们对其他传统很感兴趣”，他强调，颓废派艺术家对宗教的诗歌探索是严肃、真实和多样的(第106页)。我的兴趣不在于让宗教回归颓废派，而在于在有关宗教的诗歌中寻找颓废风格的指示，并以此更广泛地考虑如何与与“颓废”一词无关的诗人重新相遇，以显示其审美倾向的程度……
{"title":"Christ Among the Decadents: Re-encountering Religion in Edwin Arnold’s The Light of the World","authors":"Joshua Brorby","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a907677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a907677","url":null,"abstract":"Christ Among the Decadents: Re-encountering Religion in Edwin Arnold’s The Light of the World Joshua Brorby (bio) In 1879, Edwin Arnold completed the poem that would make him famous, his epic life of Gau ta ma Bud dha, The Light of Asia. Published in over thirty editions in the first six years of its existence, Arnold’s bestseller constitutes a model entry in two related Victorian genres: the orientalist free translation and the comparative religious primer.1 The former genre has as its most well-known representative The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1888) by Richard Francis Burton, while the latter reached its apogee with F. Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East (1879–1910). Both genres represent a re-encounter on the part of the author with an extant text in a foreign language, but for the audience they were often original reading experiences. Arnold, too, made his name by introducing unfamiliar religious traditions to English readers: in addition to epicizing the life of Buddha in The Light of Asia (1879), he enumerated the names of Allah in Pearls of the Faith (1883) and translated the Bhagavad Gita in his The Song Celestial (1885). The same cannot be said of the epic life of Christ he produced in 1891.2 Given that its readers might be expected to “know what is in the book before they open it,” as one reviewer put it at the time, The Light of the World was seen by Arnold’s contemporaries as a “missed . . . opportunity”; as Christopher Clausen has observed, it “fell dead from the press.”3 The work’s failure had to do with the fact that the epic did not adhere to either of the generic types with which Arnold had made his name, offering neither a fresh translation nor instruction in unfamiliar religious doctrine. It dwelled on the story Victorian readers knew better than any other, and in that spirit, it belongs decidedly to the realm of re-encounter. Critically reading Arnold’s epic of Christ with mid-Victorian religious controversies in mind might confirm now axiomatic observations about the period’s literary-religious culture: that it was populated by writers reimagining [End Page 143] the life of Christ for a readership acquainted with German higher criticism and Ernest Renan, the French scholar whose Vie de Jésus (1863) expunged biblical miracles to depict Christ as a historical figure.4 Likewise, reading for the specifically Buddhist presence in The Light of the World would reinforce convincing arguments identifying the Gautama Buddha as a crucial Victorian analog, and forerunner, of Christ.5 If encountered, however, alongside the emerging decadents rising to prominence as the star of Tennyson and his generation waned, The Light of the World is a much more interesting flop— one that attempts to reconcile its earnest comparative religious perspective with the hallmarks of a poetics that imagined the modern in decay. Exploring in Arnold’s “signal failure” the border between worlds seen and unseen, finite and infinite, shows how th","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135142621","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：