The Realms of Verse 1830-1870
Title | The Realms of Verse 1830-1870 PDF eBook |
Author | Matthew Reynolds |
Publisher | OUP Oxford |
Pages | 322 |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780199282029 |
Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Tennyson, and Clough lived and wrote in a time of "nation-building." The Realms of Verse brings that political and intellectual context to life, and traces its influence on the narratives, language, and form of their poetry. Theoretically astute and historically detailed, this study is the most far-reaching reassessment of Victorian poetry to have been published in recent years.
The Poetry of Chartism
Title | The Poetry of Chartism PDF eBook |
Author | Mike Sanders |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 315 |
Release | 2009-03-05 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0521899184 |
This book explores the contribution made by Chartist poetry to the struggle for fundamental democratic rights.
Epic
Title | Epic PDF eBook |
Author | Herbert F. Tucker |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 748 |
Release | 2012-11-29 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0199232997 |
Literary history has conventionally viewed Milton as the last real practitioner of the epic in English verse. Herbert Tucker's spirited book shows that the British tradition of epic poetry was unbroken from the French Revolution to World War I.
Written on the Water
Title | Written on the Water PDF eBook |
Author | Samuel Baker |
Publisher | University of Virginia Press |
Pages | 343 |
Release | 2010-07-08 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 081393043X |
The very word "culture" has traditionally evoked the land. But when such writers as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and, later, Matthew Arnold developed what would become the idea of modern culture, they modeled that idea on Britain's imperial command of the sea. Instead of locating the culture idea’s beginnings in the dynamic between the country and the city, Samuel Baker insists on taking into account the significance of water for that idea’s development. For the Romantics, figures of the island, the deluge, and the sundering tide often convey the insularity of cultures understood to stand apart from the whole; yet, Baker writes, the sea also stands in their poetry of culture as a reminder of the broader sphere of circulation in which the poet's work, if not the poet's subject, inheres. Although other books treat the history of the idea of culture, none synthesizes that history with the literary history of maritime empire. Written on the Water tracks an uncanny interrelationship between ocean imagery and culturalist rhetoric of culture forward from the late Augustans to the mid-Victorians. In so doing, it analyzes Wordsworth's pronounced ambivalence toward the sea, Coleridge's sojourn as an imperial functionary in Malta, Byron's cosmopolitan seafaring tales, and Arnold's dual identity as "poet of water" and prose arbiter of "culture." It also considers Romanticism's classical inheritance, arguing that the Lake Poets dissolved into the idea of culture the Virgilian system of pastoral, georgic, and epic modes of literature and life. This compelling new study will engage any reader interested in the intellectual and literary history of Britain and the lived experience of British Romanticism.
Essays on James Clarence Mangan
Title | Essays on James Clarence Mangan PDF eBook |
Author | S. Sturgeon |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 242 |
Release | 2014-12-18 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1137273380 |
This is the first collection of essays to focus on the extraordinary literary achievement of James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849), increasingly recognized as one of the most important Irish writers of the nineteenth century. It features contributions by acclaimed contemporary writers including Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson.
Charity and Condescension
Title | Charity and Condescension PDF eBook |
Author | Daniel Siegel |
Publisher | Ohio University Press |
Pages | 224 |
Release | 2012-04-22 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0821444077 |
Charity and Condescension explores how condescension, a traditional English virtue, went sour in the nineteenth century, and considers how the failure of condescension influenced Victorian efforts to reform philanthropy and to construct new narrative models of social conciliation. In the literary work of authors like Dickens, Eliot, and Tennyson, and in the writing of reformers like Octavia Hill and Samuel Barnett, condescension—once a sign of the power and value of charity—became an emblem of charity’s limitations. This book argues that, despite Victorian charity’s reputation for idealistic self-assurance, it frequently doubted its own operations and was driven by creative self-critique. Through sophisticated and original close readings of important Victorian texts, Daniel Siegel shows how these important ideas developed even as England struggled to deal with its growing underclass and an expanding notion of the state’s responsibility to its poor.
The Burden of Rhyme
Title | The Burden of Rhyme PDF eBook |
Author | Naomi Levine |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 264 |
Release | 2024-09-13 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0226834980 |
A major new account of Victorian poetry and its place in the field of literary studies. The Burden of Rhyme shows how the nineteenth-century search for the origin of rhyme shaped the theory and practice of poetry. For Victorians, rhyme was not (as it was for the New Critics, and as it still is for us) a mere technique or ahistorical form. Instead, it carried vivid historical fantasies derived from early studies of world literature. Naomi Levine argues that rhyme’s association with the advent of literary modernity and with a repertoire of medievalist, Italophilic, and orientalist myths about love, loss, and poetic longing made it a sensitive historiographic instrument. Victorian poets used rhyme to theorize both literary history and the most elusive effects of aesthetic form. This Victorian formalism, which insisted on the significance of origins, was a precursor to and a challenge for twentieth-century methods. In uncovering the rich relationship between Victorian poetic forms and a forgotten style of literary-historical thought, The Burden of Rhyme reveals the unacknowledged influence of Victorian poetics—and its repudiation—on the development of modern literary criticism.