To what extent is the distinction between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian' valuable or just? Is the Romantic/Victorian demarcation merely a convenience for the sake of the curriculum? How is the quarrel among different strains of Romanticism continued and developed in the Victorian period? How do Victorian texts interact with, echo, or resist Romantic texts? In what ways did the Romantic poets establish the terms within which, or against which, Victorian poets were debating? This volume of original essays addresses these questions; it also demonstrates how well the Romantics thought, and with what ferocious diligence the Victorians explored, resisted, and reworked the Romantic vision.

From the contents: Virginia BLAIN: Be these his daughters?: Caroline Bowles Southey, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and disruption in a patriarchal poetics of women's autobiography. - Meg TASKER: 'Aurora Leigh': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's novel approach to the woman poet. - E. WARWICK SLINN: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the problem of female agency. - Debra FRIED: In Daisy's lane: variants and personification in Emily Dickinson.

The Victorian period was a golden age for the study of Milton. Yet the influence of Milton on poetry, and on literature more generally, during the period is often obscure. Victorian writers rarely display the overt, self-conscious engagement with Milton that typified so much Romantic writing earlier in the nineteenth century. In Milton and the Victorians Erik Gray argues that this shift represents not a breach but an expansion: if Milton's influence seems less remarkable than before, it is due not to his absence but to his pervasiveness. Through detailed consideration of works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, and George Eliot, Gray shows how Victorian writers tended to draw upon the less sublime, more understated elements of Milton's writings. In tracing the characteristically oblique influence of Milton on Victorian authors, Gray also draws attention to important aspects of Milton's own work, notably the way it often depicts power being exerted indirectly. Gray thus proposes new and nuanced models of literary relations, while offering original and elegant readings both of Milton's poetry and of major works of Victorian literature.

An art historian, cultural critic and political theorist, John Ruskin was, above all, a great educator. The inspiration behind William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust and Mahatma Gandhi, Ruskin’s influence can be felt increasingly in every sphere education today. John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education brings together top international Ruskin scholars, exploring Ruskin’s many-faceted writings, pointing to some of the key educational issues raised by his work, and concluding with a powerful rereading of his ecological writing and apocalyptic vision of the earth’s future. In anticipation of the bicentennial of Ruskin’s birth in 2019, this volume makes a fresh and significant contribution to Victorian studies in the twenty-first century. It is dedicated to Dinah Birch, a much-loved Victorian specialist and authority on John Ruskin.

Wordsworth: A Poet's History examines the range of Wordsworth's poetry and criticism over the course of his career. It examines the writer and his works against the backdrop of revolutionary history, public, personal as well as political. The study foregrounds the ways in which Wordsworth's account of 'self-representation in poetic language' coils around and recoils from the linguistic traumas excited by the French Revolution. The book also examines Wordsworth's patriotism and the evolution of this as demonstrated in his poetry.