VICTORIAN POETRY最新文献

{"title":"“Having dared to touch with bloody hands the verses”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Embodied Approach to the Homeric Corpus","authors":"Allison Scheidegger Reising","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a907678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a907678","url":null,"abstract":"“Having dared to touch with bloody hands the verses”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Embodied Approach to the Homeric Corpus Allison Scheidegger Reising (bio) In an 1845 letter to Anne Thomson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter EBB) expresses serious reservations about the value of classical learning, particularly for women: the Greek language [. . .] swallows up year after year of studious life. Now I have a “doxy” . . . that there is no exercise of the mind so little profitable to the mind, as the study of languages. It is the nearest thing to a passive recipiency . . is it not? . . as a mental action— though it leaves one as weary as ennui itself.1 EBB worries that popularizing “the mere fashion of scholarship among women” would be “disagreeable” and “worse than vain,” and wishes that English women would read and appreciate con temporary poets. Yet in the year she wrote this seeming disavowal, EBB was engaged in multiple short translations from Greek commissioned by Thomson herself, as well as a complete retranslation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound.2 In her case at least, learning Greek did not lull her mind into mere “passive recipiency.” In this essay, I suggest that EBB’s scholarly relationships, critical practices, and short Homeric translations can help us reconcile her expressed concerns regarding classical study with her own avid scholarly practice and frequent re-encounters with Greek texts. EBB’s embodied imagining of the Homeric text and Homeric criticism enables her to take a nurturing and expansive approach that stands in contrast to the pedantic and limiting focus on textual purity common in the classical scholarship of her time. At least part of EBB’s expressed ambivalence about classical scholarship stemmed from lingering embarrassment over her first translation of Prometheus [End Page 161] Bound, published in 1833, which she described to her friend Mary Russell Mitford as a “hard dry unvital translation” that failed “poetically,” albeit not “scholastically.” After describing her mortification that this translation had been published and was still receiving public attention, EBB critiques what she calls “linguaism”: As for the ancient languages, or any acquirement in the particular department of languages, you cant [sic] think how little I care for it. It puts me out of patience to see people glorying, evidently however silently, in the multitudes of grammars, when the glorious rich literature of our own beloved England lies by their side without a look or a sigh that way. And then a dictionary life is the vainest & least exalting of lives. No occupation claims the time which the acquisition of a language does, with an equal non-requital to the intellect. Further on in this letter, however, EBB moderates her critique of “linguaism” in a way that gives clues as to why, in spite of “how little” she claims to care for skill in “the ancient languages,” she would go on to translate Prometheus Bound twice, and even revise that seco","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"1 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":"135142623","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}

{"title":"Understanding Media with L.E.L.: Women Poets, New Media, and the Petrarchan Gaze","authors":"Christie Debelius","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a907682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a907682","url":null,"abstract":"Understanding Media with L.E.L.: Women Poets, New Media, and the Petrarchan Gaze Christie Debelius (bio) At the beginning of Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s “The Improvisatrice” (1824), the poem’s titular speaker— a talented painter and poet-performer— sings of her first painting, a representation of the meeting between the Italian poet Petrarch and the beautiful, yet often silent, Laura.1 As she does so, she engages in a complex act of what media scholars call remediation, transposing one medium into another: employing her own assortment of artistic talents, the Improvisatrice transforms Petrarch’s poetry into painting and then back into poetry again when she ekphrastically describes her own work.2 By recounting her re-encounter with Petrarch, Landon’s speaker inserts herself into an established artistic tradition wherein women have conventionally played the role of silent objects to be gazed upon. Ultimately, though, the remediation of her painting back into verse ensures that she, unlike Laura, can still claim the poet’s speaking role. For Landon, this literary re-encounter with Petrarch is more than a simple homage. It represents one facet of a complex theory of gender and media in a media ecology saturated with texts that demanded visual— rather than oral or aural— engagement. Questions of intermediality, or the relationships among media, were a career-long fascination for Landon, who was one of the most prolific writers for “the nineteenth century’s newest media,” including annuals.3 Sometimes referred to as gift books, these ornately decorated periodical volumes placed engraved images side by side with text, creating a newly charged connection between visual and verbal media and “an increasingly visual bibliographic experience.” 4 Because of the central role that looking played in both writing for and reading these publications, the relationship between Petrarch and Laura remained an important frame for Landon’s understanding of this developing new medium. By examining Petrarchism’s role in Landon’s writing for annuals, this essay shows how Landon found within long-standing literary traditions a framework for understanding the workings of new media and their [End Page 245] implications for women writers. In her theory of media, Landon anticipated the work of present-day media theorists, whose explorations of the relationship between media and systems of power center on how our encounters with media technologies can be shaped by gendered power dynamics. In recent years, scholars of the nineteenth century have increasingly turned to approaches informed by media studies to revisit the works of women poets.5 Sarah Anne Storti advocates for the sophistication of Landon’s poetry specifically in these terms, suggesting that Landon ought to be viewed as “a brilliant media theorist and practitioner” who “leveraged an experimental role in early nineteenth-century print media to explore the affordances of representational art in an era of mass production”","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"104 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":"135142624","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}

{"title":"Ghostly Selves in Augusta Webster’s Poetry","authors":"Andrea Selleri","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a907679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a907679","url":null,"abstract":"Ghostly Selves in Augusta Webster’s Poetry Andrea Selleri (bio) And now it seems a jest to talk of me / as if I could be one with her.”1 Thus Eulalie, the high-end prostitute featured in Augusta Webster’s most famous poem, “A Castaway,” thinking about herself as she was as a young girl. Eulalie has stumbled on a philosophical and existential problem that emerges time and again in the history of thought and literature alike: where does the thing I call me begin and end? Over the course of a life, is there a point beyond which the continuity of the particular arrangement of molecules and memories and relations I happen to inhabit is just not enough to feel that the same person is being thought about? And what happens when such a “me-but-no-longer-really-me” barges into my consciousness again? This sort of intractable existential conundrum is an ideal hunting ground for post-Romantic poetry. As we look at our pasts, most of us feel that there is some sort of difference between the “I” that sits in the office this after noon and the “I” that was ripped screaming from a womb, or the one who threw the peppers into the canal to see if they floated. This may be due to sheer temporal distance, or to one particular traumatic event— say, taking part in a war, or suddenly finding oneself parentless, or like Eulalie becoming a “castaway”— which acts as a watershed between two near-irreducibly distinct senses of self. In hindsight, such “I’s” are so unlike the present “I” from which we picture or reminisce about their doings that the grammatical identity may feel at best like a strained convention. And yet, old selves may turn out to be not exactly dead but ghostly, materializing after their proper lifespan to puzzle, shock, or bemuse their successors. Simple reminiscence may thus take on an uncanny quality, as it does for Eulalie.2 Such re-encounters with supposedly defunct versions of ourselves are liable to produce an intimation of incongruousness, a feeling that the quiddity of experience has become at odds with the inherited grammatical or existential categories through which we describe it. The idea of the self as an unstable entity is often associated with literary modernism, and with late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century intellectual attitudes and movements such as Nietzschean anti-foundationalism and Freudian psychoanalysis. The most frequently cited operational category for this [End Page 187] destabilization is “the unconscious,” an idea that first appeared in English in 1866 courtesy of E. S. Dallas, who foregrounded it in his The Gay Science, and which became the subject of a book, Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewußten, three years later.3 The earliest such developments are indeed coeval with Webster’s formative years; nonetheless, in this essay I want to suggest that another category, temporality, is more relevant to her poetic thematization of the self. A time-based problematization of selfhood had been available to philosophers","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"40 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":"135142625","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}

{"title":"Hopkins Unselved","authors":"Jack L Hart","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a907680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a907680","url":null,"abstract":"Hopkins Unselved Jack L Hart (bio) In a well-known note, Hopkins identifies a characteristic he terms “Parnas-sian.” This “language of verse,” he says, “can only be written spoken by poets”; it is “ wrspoken on and from the level of a poet’s mind.” Resisting the fickleness of “inspiration,” this “Parnassian” way of composing relies on a kind of certainty: Great men, poets I mean, have each their own dialect as it were of Parnassian, formed generally as they go on writing, and at last, ^– ^ this point is to be marked,–they can see things and describe them in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort of inspiration. In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, of his manner, of his mannerism if you like. . . . Now it is a mark of Parnassian that one could conceive oneself writing it if one were the poet.1 That “most of his style” invites further reflection: as the deleted “written” almost splutters out again as “wr-,” we see the poet continually drawn back to something about poetry he cannot quite pin down here—or a temporality managed on the page that he cannot escape, as the deletions seem to suggest. Even as he begins to draw up a distinction between “inspired” poetry and “Parnas-sian,” his qualification (“generally”) puts him on the defensive. A further self-revision from “manner” to “mannerism” shows Hopkins reaching toward ideas rather than simply retreading them, both syntactically and in his revisionary pro cesses. If describing the more traditional notion of inspiration comes easily, turning his attention to how poetry works on the “level of a poet’s mind” is a sticking point. There is a subterranean anxiety for the poet concealed within his description of conceiving “oneself writing it if one were the poet.” Fluency in one’s own style arrives not as an aspiration but as a caution; to write as if you were yourself, then, might be a kind of self-assuredness to be avoided. That Hopkins’s interest in a compositional style proved on the pulse might reflect his conception of selfhood is suggested in “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” “Each mortal thing,” he writes, “does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; / Selves–goes itself; myself it speaks and spells.”2 That dash is not necessarily the self-enervating, but suspends the process [End Page 205] of selving before it transforms into something more discrete. It is worth noting that in an earlier draft the poet wrote, “Itself in every stroke it speaks and spells” (PW, p. 115). These lines sound increasingly like an echo of Keats’s description of his own creative process, which insists that poetry “cannot be matured by law & precept, but by watchfulness in itself— That which is creative must create itself,” helpfully reminding us that the fascination with self-formation in Hopkins’s poetry cannot be wholly disengaged from the creative development of these poems.3 How the growth of a poem can “resemble th","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"20 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":"135142627","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}

{"title":"Tennyson","authors":"Linda K. Hughes","doi":"10.1353/vp.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"own propensity for hoaxes and pseudonyms was tackled recently by Colton Valentine in “ ‘I Sappho’: A Case for Character in the Early Writings of Algernon Swinburne” [VP 59, no. 1 (2021): 23–47]). The volume White Stains, for instance, was presented as the work of one George Archibald Bishop, a fictitious figure who, having “degenerated into a raving erotomaniac,” died when his asylum burned down during the Commune in Paris (p. 782). The poems narrate Bishop’s “progression of diabolism” (Crowley’s phrase), upping the transgressive ante as the pseudonymous poet descends deeper into obsessions (p. 783). The dramatic pre sen ta tion of the poems, as well as Crowley’s tongueincheek defense of the volume as written “in utmost seriousness and all innocence,” recall Swinburne’s own canny apol o getics in Notes on Poems and Reviews (1866). Fi nally, two articles suggest the reach of Swinburne beyond the bounds of Victorian studies. In “ ‘Burnt to the Bone’ with Love, Damnation and Sin: Phaedra as the Swinburnian Femme Damnée (Armenian Folia Anglistika 17, no. 23 [2021]:124–149), Lilith Ayvazyan compares Swinburne’s “Phaedra” with classical and con temporary antecedents from Euripides to Marina Tsvetaeva. Ayvazyan contends that Swinburne and Tsvetaeva are novel in ignoring the theme of sin and focusing solely on Phaedra’s desire. And while my German is not good enough to say much more than this, I will note simply, by way of the article abstract, that Torsten Voß explores modes of authorial selfpresentation in Felix Dörmann, Maurice Rollinat, and Swinburne in “Zwischen Mythos, Rausch und Ennui: Die Künstlichkeit des Erotischen als Inszenierungsmodus von Autorschaft in der Lyrik Felix Dörmanns mit Seitenblicken auf Charles Algernon Swinburne und Maurice Rollinat” (Journal of Austrian Studies 54, no. 2 [2021]: 1–29). Treating Swinburne in comparative contexts is a relatively rare phenomenon and could surely sustain more inquiry.","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"60 1","pages":"407 - 417"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45280989","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}

{"title":"Robert Browning","authors":"S. Bailey","doi":"10.1353/vp.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Machine Learning in Causal Inference— How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways” (American Journal of Epidemiology 190, no. 8 [August 2021]: 1483– 1487), Laura B. Balzer and Ma ya L. Petersen through their title warn that machine learning can be used to research but may create pitfalls unless the formal framework for analy sis includes both causal and statistical inference. With their allusion, Balzer and Petersen suggest that EBB’s poetry has become essential to our language and cultural knowledge, if not to our ability to conduct statistical analy sis.","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"60 1","pages":"356 - 372"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45721846","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}

{"title":"Swinburne","authors":"J. Sider","doi":"10.1353/vp.2022.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2022.0024","url":null,"abstract":"In “William Morris: An Annotated Bibliography 2016–2017,” David and Sheila Latham provide the nineteenth installment of their biannual annotated compilations of critical and scholarly contributions on Morris and his circle. This twoyear period saw 119 publications, with the greatest number devoted to lit er a ture (p. 29), the decorative arts (p. 28), and more general items (p. 27). Politics lagged a bit behind, with seventeen entries, and book design weighed in with seven. The Lathams’ invaluable biblio graphies can be consulted online through the US William Morris Society website, but at some point, readers would benefit from an aggregated and indexed compilation; with twenty installments covering forty years, the next version might offer a propitious gathering point. The William Morris Archive has added several introductions during 2021— for Poems by the Way by David Latham, Beowulf by Yuri Cowan, and Sigurd the Volsung by Peter Wright. An inspiring conclusion to Morris studies of the year is provided by the artist David Mabb’s “News from SOMEWhERE” (JWMS 24, nos. 1–2 [2021]: 88–94), a twentyfoot painting and collage created from altered versions of Morris’s text that glow in front of a black nightsky background. The work is made from altered pages of a facsimile of the Kelmscott Press edition of News from Nowhere that have been overpainted in black, leaving only ornamented initials vis i ble as these spell out “somewhere,” creating an effect like stars leaping forth against the night sky. Mabb notes that the exhibit is designed, like its source text, as “a utopian space which rejects late nineteenthcentury industrial cap i tal ist society in all its exploitation and ugliness” (p. 88), and he interprets his painting’s (and Morris’s) message of deferred hope: “it is out of fragments and facsimiles, which can be appropriated from the past and repurposed for the future, that a new somewhere might be made pos si ble, even if there appears nowhere but the night sky for a somewhere at pre sent” (p. 89).","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"60 1","pages":"403 - 407"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45930146","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}

{"title":"Project Muse: Ernest Dowson and \"the Right Type of Girl\"","authors":"R. Stark","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a905523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a905523","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"61 1","pages":"128 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43935143","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}

{"title":"King Poppy: An Association Copy: An Addendum to McCormack","authors":"W. Baker","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a905524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a905524","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"61 1","pages":"129 - 130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45394630","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}

{"title":"Keble Quoting: Citations, Invention, and Poetry","authors":"Ashley Faulkner","doi":"10.1353/vp.2023.a905520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a905520","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54107,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN POETRY","volume":"61 1","pages":"33 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48552983","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}