Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence: Sexuality, Belief and the Self

ISBN-13: 9780754651086 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 200 str.

John Holmes

Opis

In 1870, Dante Gabriel Rossetti published the first version of his sonnet sequence "The House of Life". Over the next twenty years, dozens of poets wrote thousands of sonnets resulting in the greatest flourishing of the sonnet sequence since the 1590s. John Holmes's carefully researched and eloquent study explores the causes behind this remarkable outpouring, illuminating the contributions of the leading late Victorian sonneteers to the poetry and culture of their age. The sonnet sequence had traditionally engaged with questions of religious belief, sexual love and selfhood. By the 1860s, belief was threatened by radical scientific theories, while sexual attraction had been complicated by shifting gender relations and emerging ideas of sexuality. Poets such as Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, John Addington Symonds, Augusta Webster and Rosa Newmarch drew on the heritage of the sonnet sequence to create poetic self-portraits that are unsurpassed in their subtlety, complexity, courage, and honesty.

Recenzje

'Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence is a probing study of an important and understudied late-Victorian poetic tradition, in which John Holmes demonstrates the importance of the Rossettis as models for later writers' examination of sexuality and uses of sonnet sequences to express homoerotic as well as heterosexual sentiments-Augusta Gregory's poignant poetic expressions of love for Wilfred Scawen Blunt, for example, and Rosa Newmarch's inditement of her love for a married friend in her sequence Horae Amoris.' Florence Boos, Professor of English, University of Iowa '... a solid and well-documented case for the importance of Rossetti...' Times Literary Supplement ’... provides a fascinating account of poets and poems which have been almost entirely forgotten... by recovering their works and setting them in the context of so many other Rossetti-inspired sonnet sequences, Homes enriches our understanding of the whole field of fin-de-siècle poetry.’ The Year's Work in English Studies ’It is exhilarating to encounter such a wealth of material and John Holmes should be warmly congratulated for bringing such a rich collection of poetry back into view and for his thorough, well-informed, and insightful commentaries and contextualizations... Holmes's book is an excellent contribution to the critical literature on Rossetti and on late Victorian sonnet sequences, and deserves to be widely read.’ Modern Language Review

Spis treści

Contents: Preface; Introduction: Rossetti, the sonnet sequence and the late Victorian self; Dante Gabriel Rossetti's inclusiveness: method and meaning in The House of Life; The sons of Gabriel; Christina Rossetti replies: Monna Innominata and Later Life; From sexuality to sexualities: Marzials, Barlow, Blunt and Symonds; Female identity in transition: Gregory, Webster and Newmarch; Structures of the self: dialectic and myth in John Addington Symonds's Animi Figura; From Rossetti to Rupert Brooke: the self and the nation; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

O autorze

Dr. John Holmes is Lecturer at the School of English and American Literature, University of Reading, UK.