Browningmania, America's Love for Robert Browning

Browningmania, America's Love for Robert Browning

Author: Hédi Jaouad

Publisher: Cambria Press

Published: 2014-11-28

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1604978872

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In the 1880s and 1890s, the Victorian poet Robert Browning was the "lion" of the day in the United States, particularly in Rochester. Browning's work was widely read and discussed. Even today, there are still many in America who consider themselves Browningites, and many of them belong to Browning clubs and societies. This book, the fruit of thorough and patient archival digging, brings together various fragmentary local sources and quaint memorabilia, hitherto unknown to scholars. It vividly recovers the spirit of the fascination with Browningmania, and more broadly Victoriana, that Rochesterians and Americans in general evinced in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century.Browning's popularity, undeserved many thought, remains nonetheless a unique phenomenon in literary and cultural history, well worthy of study and comprehension. Although several books and articles were devoted to this subject, none offers a sustained explanation of how and why Browning became such an iconic figure. This book fills a gap in the scholarship and critical reception of Browning. This study offers Browning scholars and Victorianists in general a new perspective on some long-neglected but crucial material. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars in Reception and American studies as well as cultural and literary historians. Because it brings together many local anecdotes and memorabilia, this book will also find appreciative readers among the general public, especially in upstate New York region, particularly Rochester.


The Quest for Shakespeare

The Quest for Shakespeare

Author: Jeffrey Kahan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-12-11

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 3319487817

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This book traces the formation and impact of the New Shakspere Society, created in 1873, which dedicated itself to solving the mysteries of Shakespeare’s authorship by way of science. This promise, however, was undermined not only by the antics of its director, Frederick J. Furnivall, but also by the inexactitudes of the tests. Jeffrey Kahan puzzles out how a society geared towards science quickly devolved into a series of grudge matches. Nonetheless, the New Shakspere Society set the bibliographical and biographical agenda for the next century—an unusual legacy for an organization that was rife with intrigue, enmity, and incompetence; lives were ruined, lawyers consulted, and scholarship (mostly bad) produced and published.