Victorian Poetry Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
A COMPANION T O V ICTORIAN POETRY EDITED BY RICHARD CRONIN, ALISON CHAPMAN AND ANTONY H. HARRISON A Companion to Victorian Poetry Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post- canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and provid- ing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field. Published 1. A Companion to Romanticism Edited by Duncan Wu 2. A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture Edited by Herbert F. Tucker 3. A Companion to Shakespeare Edited by David Scott Kastan 4. A Companion to the Gothic Edited by David Punter 5. A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare Edited by Dympna Callagban 6. A Companion to Chaucer Edited by Peter Brown 7. A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake Edited by David Womersley 8. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture Edited by Michael Hattaway 9. A Companion to Milton Edited by Thomas N. Corns 10. A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry Edited by Neil Roberts 11. A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture Edited by Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Trebarne 12. A Companion to Restoration Drama Edited by Susan J. Owen 13. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing Edited by Anita Pacheco 14. A Companion to Renaissance Drama Edited by Arthur F. Kinney 15. A Companion to Victorian Poetry Edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison 16. A Companion to the Victorian Novel Edited by Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing 17–20. A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: Volumes I–IV Edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard 21. A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America Edited by Charles L. Crow 22. A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism Edited by Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted 23. A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South Edited by Richard Gray and Owen Robinson 24. A Companion to American Fiction 1780–1865 Edited by Shirley Samuels 25. A Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914 Edited by Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson 26. A Companion to Digital Humanities Edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth 27. A Companion to Romance Edited by Corinne Saunders 28. A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000 Edited by Brian W. Shaffer 29. A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama Edited by David Krasner 30. A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture Edited by Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia 31. A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture Edited by Rory McTurk 32. A Companion to Tragedy Edited by Rebecca Bushnell 33. A Companion to Narrative Theory Edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz 34. A Companion to Science Fiction Edited by David Seed 35. A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America Edited by Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer 36. A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance Edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen 37. A Companion to Mark Twain Edited by Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd 38. A Companion to European Romanticism Edited by Michael K. Ferber 39. A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture Edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar 40. A Companion to Walt Whitman Edited by Donald D. Kummings 41. A Companion to Herman Melville Edited by Wyn Kelley 42. A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c.1350 – c.1500 Edited by Peter Brown 43. A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama: 1880–2005 Edited by Mary Luckhurst 44. A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry Edited by Christine Gerrard 45. A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets Edited by Michael Schoenfeldt 46. A Companion to Satire Edited by Ruben Quintero 47. A Companion to William Faulkner Edited by Richard C. Moreland A COMPANION T O V ICTORIAN POETRY EDITED BY RICHARD CRONIN, ALISON CHAPMAN AND ANTONY H. HARRISON © 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd a Blackwell Publishing company 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5018, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia Kurfürstendamm 57, 10707 Berlin, Germany The right of Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony H. Harrison to be identified as the Authors of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd First published in paperback 2007 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1 2007 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for. ISBN 978-0-631-22207-1 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4051-7612-5 (paperback: alk. paper) A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. 1 1 Set in 10 /2/12 /2 pt Garamond 3 by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall. The publisher's policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary Chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com Contents Editors’ Preface viii Notes on Contributors x Chronology xv Introduction: Victorian Poetics Carol T. Christ 1 PART ONE Varieties and Forms 23 1 Epic Herbert F. Tucker 25 2 Domestic and Idyllic Linda H. Peterson 42 3 Lyric Matthew Rowlinson 59 4 Dramatic Monologue E. Warwick Slinn 80 5 Sonnet and Sonnet Sequence Alison Chapman 99 6 Elegy Seamus Perry 115 7 Hymn J. R. Watson 134 vi Contents 8 Nonsense Roderick McGillis 155 9 Verse Novel Dino Felluga 171 10 Verse Drama Adrienne Scullion 187 11 Working-Class Poetry Florence Boos 204 12 The Classical Tradition Richard Jenkyns 229 13 Arthurian Poetry and Medievalism Antony H. Harrison 246 14 Poetry in Translation J.-A. George 262 15 Tractarian Poetry Stephen Prickett 279 16 The Spasmodics Richard Cronin 291 17 The Pre-Raphaelite School David Riede 305 18 The Poetry of the 1890s Chris Snodgrass 321 PART TWO Production, Distribution and Reception 343 19 The Market Lee Erickson 345 20 Anthologies and the Making of the Poetic Canon Natalie M. Houston 361 21 Reviewing Joanne Shattock 378 Contents vii 22 Poetry and Illustration Lorraine Janzen Kooistra 392 PART THREE Victorian Poetry and Victorian Culture 419 23 Nationhood and Empire Margaret Linley 421 24 Poetry in the Four Nations Matthew Campbell 438 25 Poetry and Religion W. David Shaw 457 26 Poetry and Science Alan Rauch 475 27 Landscape and Cityscape Pauline Fletcher 493 28 Vision and Visuality Catherine Maxwell 510 29 Marriage and Gender Julia F. Saville 526 30 Sexuality and Love John Maynard 543 Index 567 Editors’ Preface In England, the period from about 1830 until World War I is normally distinguished by historians as ‘Victorian’ in honour of the longest-reigning monarch in British history, who dominated the era as a kind of cultural icon. These years witnessed an extraordinary flow- ering of literary culture, comparable in many respects to what occurred under England’s other long-lived and remarkably influential female monarch, Queen Elizabeth I. Despite the virtual absence of significant drama produced for the stage during most of the Victo- rian era, every other genre flourished. (Much great dramatic literature did in fact emerge, but not in the form of stage plays.) The productivity of poets, novelists and writers of self-consciously artistic prose non-fiction remains, from the vantage of the early twenty- first century, breathtaking. The work of the poets, on whom this volume focuses, retains its ability to enchant, amaze and inspire. Victorian poetry, as a vast and extraordinarily complex body of pro- ductions, employs every established verse form in the language and exploits every estab- lished poetic subgenre, while refining upon some, such as the dramatic monologue, the verse drama and the pastoral elegy, in ways previously unimagined. Produced by authors of both sexes in every social class from all districts in the British Isles (and indeed the colonies), it engages a remarkable variety of cultural discourses – political, religious, social, economic and scientific – in both direct and nuanced ways that still strike readers as highly original, and also aesthetically and ideologically powerful. Coming to critical terms with this diverse body of materials is a project that in itself raises many critical and theoreti- cal issues, issues that the editors of this Companion have attempted to address openly in both the content of its chapters and its organizing principles. Readers of this volume will immediately notice its differences from some of the other Blackwell Companions, as well from other works that attempt in some way to present a critical or historical introduction to Victorian poetry. Instead of collecting essays that treat significant Victorian poets or poems individually, we have brought together specially com- missioned chapters that reflect both the multifariousness of Victorian poetry and the variety of critical approaches to it – many of them richly informed by recent develop- ments in textual and cultural theory.