Over 170 beloved poems by the major poets of the 19th century, including works by Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Rossetti, Meredith, Swinburne, Hopkins, Kipling, and others. An introduction and biographical notes on the poets are included.
This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers. Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.
In a work that is uniquely comprehensive and theoretically astute, Isobel Armstrong rescues Victorian poetry from its longstanding sepia image as `a moralised form of romantic verse', and unearths its often subversive critique of nineteenth-century culture and politics.
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
SOUND THE DEEP WATERS is a beautiful anthology of poetry and art by women from the Victorian Age. Divided into four sections: Love's Bitter Sweets, Moments of Delight, Dreams and Realities, and Last Songs, this gift-sized book contains works by poets such as Christina Rossetti, Emily Jane Bronte, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and is illustrated with Pre-Raphaelite images. Pamela Norris has skillfully selected paintings and poems that put the reader into the heart of the Victorian world, and the result is a lovely selection that can serve as an introduction to Romantic poetry, or as a keepsake for readers who already appreciate the poetry of the era.
Daniel Karlin has selected poetry written and published during the reign of Queen Victoria, (1837-1901). Giving pride of place to Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti, the volume offers generous selections from other major poets such asArnold, Emily Bronte, Hardy and Hopkins, and makes room for several poem-sequences in their entirety. It is wonderful, too, in its discovery and inclusion of eccentric, dissenting, un-Victorian voices, poets who squarely refuse to 'represent' their period. It also includes the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Meredith, James Thomson and Augusta Webster.
Across Europe, and particularly in Great Britain, the Romantic age coincided with a large-scale revival of lost literatures and the first attempts to create a coherent history of Western literature. Calling into question that history, Stuart Curran demonstrates that the Romantic poets, far from being indifferent or hostile to popular forms of literature were actually obsessed with them as repositories of literary conventions and conveyors of implicit ideological value. Whether in their proccupation with fixed forms, which resulted in the incomparable artistry of Romantic odes, or in their rethinking of major genres like the pastoral, the epic, and the romance, the Romantic poets transformed every element they touched to suit their own democratic, secular and skeptical ethos--a world view recognizably modern in its dimensions.
Reading Victorian Poetry “Richard Cronin’s exceptionally fine book carries out just what its title promises – reading. The pleasure of his adroit, meticulously imaginative insights into verbal and metrical effects is constant … One of the best general readings of Victorian poetry in the last ten years.” Victorian Studies “Reading Victorian Poetry will make an excellent introduction to Victorian poetry and gives a good account of a number of key issues.” English Studies Reading Victorian Poetry offers close readings of poems from the Victorian era, carefully selected by the author to reflect the breadth and diversity of nineteenth-century poetry. Richard Cronin’s outstanding consideration of a wide range of poets reflects the unusual diversity of Victorian poetry, which includes, amongst others, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, D.G. Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The book investigates key concerns of the era in which poetry was ousted by the novel from the culturally central position that it had enjoyed for centuries. The result is an important and exciting contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century poetry, and a crucial resource for anyone interested in Victorian literature.
This engaging volume provides readers with the essential criticism on nineteenth-century poetry, organised around key areas of debate in the field. The critical texts included in this volume reflect both a traditional and modern emphasis on the study of poetry in the long nineteenth century. These are then tied up by a newly written essay summarising the ideas and encouraging further study and debate. The book includes: sections on Periodization; 'What is Poetry?'; Politics; Prosody; Forms; Emotion, feeling, affect; Religion; Sexuality; and Science work by writers such as William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins critics and historians including Isobel Armstrong, Richard Cronin, Jason Rudy, Joseph Bristow and Gillian Beer Detailed introductions and critical commentary by Francis O'Gorman, Rosie Miles, Stefano Evangelisto, Natalie Hoffman, Martin Dubois, Gregory Tate Providing both the essential criticism along with clear introductions and analysis, this book is the perfect guide to students who wish to engage in the exciting criticism and debates of nineteenth-century poetry.
Perhaps because major Victorians like Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold proscribed Romantic melancholy as morbidly diseased and unsuitable for poetic expression, critics have neglected or understated the central importance of melancholy in Victorian poetry. Allegories of One's Own Mind re-directs our attention to a mode that Arnold was rejecting as morbid but also acknowledging when he disparaged the widely current idea that the highest ambition of poetry should be to present an allegory of the poet's own mind. This book shows how early Victorian poets suffered from and railed against what they perceived to be a "disabling post-Wordsworthian melancholy"-we might refer to it as depression-and yet benefited from this self-absorbed or love-obsessed state, which ironically made them more productive. David G. Riede argues that the dominant thematic and formal concerns of the age, in fact, are embodied in the ambivalence of Carlyle, Arnold, and others, who pitted a Victorian ideology of duty, rationality, and high moral character against a still compelling Romantic cultivation of the deep self intuited as melancholy. Such ambivalence, in fact, is in itself constitutive of melancholy, long understood as the product of conscience raging against inchoate desire, and it constitutes the mood of the age's most important poetry, represented here in the major works of Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and even in the notoriously "optimistic" Robert Browning. David G. Riede is professor of English at The Ohio State University.