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.

Victorian Literature is a comprehensive and fully annotated anthology with a flexible design that allows teachers and students to pursue traditional or innovative lines of inquiry—from the canon to its extensions and its contexts. Represents the period's major writers of prose, poetry, drama, and more, including Tennyson, Arnold, the Brownings, Carlyle, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Wilde, Eliot, and the Brontës Promotes an ideologically and culturally varied view of Victorian society with the inclusion of women, working-class, colonial, and gay and lesbian writers Incorporates recent scholarship with 5 contextual sections and innovative sub-sections on topics like environmentalism and animal rights; mass literacy and mass media; sex and sexuality; melodrama and comedy; the Irish question; ruling India and the Indian Mutiny and innovations in print culture Emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of the field with a focus on social, cultural, artistic, and historical factors Includes a fully annotated companion website for teachers and students offering expanded context sections, additional readings from key writers, appendices, and an extensive bibliography

In Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, Isobel Armstrong rescued Victorian poetry from its longstanding sepia image as ‘a moralised form of romantic verse' and unearthed its often subversive critique of nineteenth-century culture and politics. In this uniquely comprehensive and theoretically astute new edition, Armstrong provides an entirely new preface that notes the key advances in the criticism of Victorian poetry since her classic work was first published in 1993. A new chapter on the alternative fin de siècle sees Armstrong discuss Michael Field, Rudyard Kipling, Alice Meynell and a selection of Hardy lyrics. The extensive bibliography acts as a key resource for students and scholars alike.