Victorian Narrative Verse, edited by Charles Williams, is a vast collection of poetry spanning the duration of the Victorian era. Williams, a member of the literary group known as The Inklings, has meticulously curated a selection of poems that encapsulate the unique spirit and culture of the time. This anthology serves as a window into the rich tapestry of Victorian literature, drawing attention to the era's penchant for storytelling through verse.

The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life considers the rise of a hybrid generic form, the verse-novel, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such poems combined epic length with novelistic plots in the attempt to capture not a heroic past but the quotidian present. Victorian verse-novels also tended to be rough-mixed, their narrative sections interspersed with shorter, lyrical verses in varied measures. In flouting the rules of contemporary genre theory, which saw poetry as the purview of the eternal and ideal and relegated the everyday to the domain of novelistic prose, verse-novels proved well suited to upsetting other hierarchies, as well, including those of gender and class. The genre's radical energies often emerge from the competition between lyric and narrative drives, between the desire for transcendence and the quest to find meaning in what happens next; the unusual marriage plots that structure such poems prove crucibles of these rival forces. Generic tensions also yield complex attitudes towards time and space: the book's first half considers the temporality of love, while its second looks at generic geography through the engagement of novels in verse with Europe and the form's transatlantic travels. Both well-known verse-novels (Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage, Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House) and lesser-known examples are read closely alongside a few nearly related works (Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book). An Afterword traces the verse-novel's substantial influence on the modernist novel.

This is the final of the four volumes published from 1868-1869that make up Robert Browning'sThe Ring and the Book, a long blank-verse poem composed of 12 books and over 20,000 lines. This volume includes the booksThe Pope, GuidoandThe Book and the Ring.

Victorian Poetry in Context offers a lively and accessible introduction to the diverse range of poetry written in the Victorian period. Considering such issues as reform and protest, gender, science and belief this book sets out the social and cultural contexts for the poetry of a fast-changing era. Sections on Victorian poetics, form and Victorian voices introduce the key literary contexts of poetry's production, and poetic innovations of the period such as the dramatic monologue are highlighted . At the heart of the book is a focus on the importance of attentive close reading, with original readings offered of well-known texts alongside those that have recently received renewed attention within scholarship. The book also offers an overview of critical approaches to several key texts and discussion of how Victorian poetry has remained influential in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying Victorian poetry.