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.

Poetics en Passant presents a 'cross-channel' poetics that redefines the relationship between 'Victorian' and 'modern' poetry by understanding Christina Rossetti's poetics of 'stealth' as an important counterpart to Baudelairean 'shock.'

Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible charts the impact of post-Enlightenment biblical criticism on English literary culture. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a widespread reevaluation of biblical inspiration, in which the Bible’s poetic nature came to be seen as an integral part of its religious significance. Understandably, then, many poets who followed this interpretative revolution—including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—came to reconceive their highest vocational ambitions: if the Bible is essentially poetry, then modern poetry might perform a cultural role akin to that of scripture. This context equally illuminates the aims and achievements of famous Victorian unbelievers such as Arthur Hugh Clough and George Eliot, who also responded enthusiastically to the poetic ideal of an inspired text. Building upon a recent and ongoing reevaluation of religion as a vital aspect of Victorian culture, Charles LaPorte shows the enduring relevance of religion in a period usually associated with its decline. In doing so, he helps to delineate the midcentury shape of a literary dynamic that is generally better understood in Romantic poetry of the earlier part of the century. The poets he examines all wrestled with modern findings about the Bible's fortuitous historical composition, yet they owed much of their extraordinary literary success to their ability to capitalize upon the progress of avant-garde biblical interpretation. This book's revisionary and provocative thesis speaks not only to the course of English poetics but also to the logic of nineteenth-century literary hierarchies and to the continuing evolution of religion in the modern era. Victorian Literature and Culture Series

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensusthey direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate.This volume opens up, in new and innovative ways, a range of dimensions, some familiar and some more obscure, of late Victorian and modern literature and culture, primarily in British contexts. Late Victorian into Modern emphasises the in-between: the gradual changeover from one period to the next.The volume examines shared developments, points out continuities rather than ruptures, and explores and exploits an understanding of the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries as a cultural moment in which new knowledges were forming with particular speed and intensity. The organisingprinciple of this book is to retain a key focus on literary texts, broadly understood to include familiar categories of genre as well as extra-textual elements such as press and publishing history, performance events and visual culture, while remaining keenly attentive to the inter-relations betweentext and context in the period. Individual chapters explore such topics as Celticism, the New Woman, popular fictions, literatures of empire, aestheticism, periodical culture, political formations, avant-garde poetics, and theatricality.

In Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics Jason R. Rudy connects formal poetic innovations to developments in the electrical and physiological sciences, arguing that the electrical sciences and bodily poetics cannot be separated, and that they came together with special force in the years between the 1830s, which witnessed the invention of the electric telegraph, and the 1870s, when James Clerk Maxwell's electric field theory transformed the study of electrodynamics. Combining formal poetic analysis with cultural history, Jason Rudy traces the development of Victorian physiological poetics from the Romantic poetess tradition through to the works of Alfred Tennyson, the "Spasmodic" poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Algernon Swinburne, among others.