Browning's Sordello has often been regarded as teh ultimate difficult poem, at least until its twentieth-century successors. It is also usually seen as an anomalous freak of literary history. Browning's early masterwork can be understood best, however, as a mature extension of the poetics of its time, as well as a late-Romantic attempt to write an epical work which must be read both willfully and imaginatively.
Robert Browning's pre-eminent status amongst Victorian poets has endured despite the recent broadening of the literary canon. He is the main practitioner of the period's most important poetic genre, the dramatic monologue, while his engagement with many aspects of nineteenth-century culture makes him a key figure in the wider field of Victorian studies. This stimulating introduction to Browning criticism provides an overview of the major responses to the poet's work over the last two hundred years. It offers an insightful guide to criticism from various theoretical perspectives, elucidating Browning's participation in Victorian debates about aesthetics, history, politics, religion, gender and psychology.
Taking an original approach to Robert Browning's poetics, Britta Martens focuses on a corpus of relatively neglected poems in Browning's own voice in which he reflects on his poetry, his self-conceptualization and his place in the poetic tradition. She analyzes his work in relation to Romanticism, Victorian reactions to the Romantic legacy, and wider nineteenth-century changes in poetic taste, to argue that in these poems, as in his more frequently studied dramatic monologues, Browning deploys varied dramatic methods of self-representation, often critically and ironically exposing the biases and limitations of the seemingly authoritative speaker 'Browning'. The poems thus become devices for Browning's detached evaluation of his own and of others' poetics, an evaluation never fully explicit but presented with elusive economy for the astute reader to interpret. The confrontation between the personal authorial voice and the dramatic voice in these poems provides revealing insights into the poet's highly self-conscious, conflicted and sustained engagement with the Romantic tradition and the diversely challenging reader expectations that he faces in a post-Romantic age. As the Victorian most rigorous in his rejection of Romantic self-expression, Browning is a key transitional figure between the sharply antagonistic periods of Romanticism and Modernism. He is also, as Martens persuasively demonstrates, a poet of complex contradictions and an illuminating case study for addressing the perennial issues of voice, authorial authority and self-reference.
Current work on speech pragmatics and visual thinking calls for a radical reassessment of the problem of obscurity or difficulty in Robert Browning’s work. In this innovative study, Bailey reinterprets Browning's life and work in the context of contemporary theories of language and attention, drawn from the cognitive sciences. Specifically, new readings of under-examined historical sources show the extent to which Browning’s cognitive and perceptual worlds differed from the norm, aligning him with Victorians like Sir Francis Galton or fellow-artist William Wetmore Story. Exploring how perceptual biases are transformed in the language of the poems, Bailey demonstrates how the cognitive sciences can ground a new biographical practice, drawing attention to such matters as the creative process and the ethics of understanding individuals who think differently. In doing so, she re-energizes debates about this unusual Victorian poet, his later works, and the nature of literary style.
Using Aristotle's oikonomia to establish a paradigm of wholeness and authentic engagement, Desaulniers argues that Carlyle returns language to material wholeness by insisting on situating sign within representation so that the materiality of the sign is not surrendered to the idea imposed on it. By focusing on reading as an act of Constitution within The French Revolution, she places the political crisis within a linguistic one: the Constitution becomes both a thematic and self-reflexive constituent of the linguistic process. Desaulniers concentrates on Carlyle's use of Gothic conventions, drawing upon Goethe's Faust and the Gothic romances of Maturin and Lewis. Establishing The French Revolution as a precursor to Browning's Sordello, she illustrates that the "economics" of representation remains a pivotal nineteenth-century linguistic strategy.
How should we understand Victorian conflict? The Victorians were divided between multiple views of the political, religious and social issues that motivated their changing aspirations. Such debates are a fundamental aspect of the literature of the period and these essays propose new ways of understanding their significance.
Rev. ed. of: The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics / Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, co-editors; Frank J. Warnke, O.B. Hardison, Jr., and Earl Miner, associate editors. 1993.
Accessibly written throughout, this guidebook covers biographical details, information on the historical and social contexts of Browning's work, an overview of the full range of his work and a survey of the major critical debates surrounding him and his work.
Literary history has conventionally viewed Milton as the last real practitioner of the epic in English verse. Herbert Tucker's spirited book shows that the British tradition of epic poetry was unbroken from the French Revolution to World War I.
