Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life

ISBN-13: 9783031296956 / Angielski

Lee Behlman; Olivia Loksing Moy

Opis

Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life casts new light on nineteenth-century poetry by examining the period through its popular verse forms and their surrounding social and media landscape. The volume offers insight into two central concepts of both the Victorian era and our own—status and taste—and how cultural hierarchies then and now were and are constructed and broken. By recovering the lost diversity of Victorian verse, the book maps the breadth of Victorian writing and reading practices, illustrating how these seemingly minor verse genres actually possessed crucial social functions for Victorians, particularly in education, leisure practices, the cultural production of class, and the formation of individual and communal identities. The essays consider how “major” Victorian poets, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, were also committed to writing and reading “minor” verse, further troubling the clear-cut notions of canonicity by examining the contradictions of value.

Spis treści

1 Introduction: Defining Victorian Verse 

2 The Matter with Verse: What Victorian Poetry Wasn’t, and Was 

3 Filler Poems: Synecdoche and the Serial Rhythms of Victorian Poetry 

4 Workplace Verse: Poetry, Performance and the Industrial Worker 

5 Contingent Lyrics: Christina Rossetti’s Verses and Poems 

6 Exile and Elegy: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and Colonial Verse 

7 William Barnes’s Dual Vocation and the Management of Feeling 

8 “Of China That’s Ancient and Blue”: Andrew Lang, English Parnassus, and the Figure of Form 

9 Anti-Elitist Elitist Verse: Comic Ballades, Rondeaus &c. in Punch and Fun 

10 “Visions, half-visions, guesses and darknesses…”: History as Verse in Thomas Carlyle 

11 Silence, Rhyme, and Motherhood in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song 

12 Nineteenth-Century Sonnet Contests and Parlor Games: “Leafiness” and Bits of Rhyme 

13 “Hymns That Have Helped”: Hymnody as Lived Verse for the Victorian Public 

O autorze

Lee Behlman is Associate Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Montclair State University. He co-edited the collection Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates (Routledge 2016) with Anne Longmuir, and has published articles on Victorian classicism, nineteenth-century motherhood, and light verse in journals such as Victorian Poetry, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. 

Olivia Loksing Moy is an Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York, Lehman College. She is the author of The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry and has published widely on Romantic and Victorian poetry, the Gothic, and comparative and world literatures. With Marco Ramírez, she is co-editor and co-translator of Julio Cortázar’s Imagen de John Keats. Moy is director of The CUNY Rare Book Scholars and serves as a volume lead for the Michael Field Diaries Project.  

Blurb

“This exhilarating collection opens up crucial glimpses into the widely and even wildly disparate historical and theoretical practices of Victorian poetic studies in our time. With its revelatory showcasing of the forms and forces of “mere verse,” this is a volume to relish and debate."
—Tricia Lootens, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of English emerita, University of Georgia

“This wonderful volume gives us a new way to comprehend Victorian poetry. Specifically, it expands the field of Victorian poetry studies by reminding us of the period’s rich terrain of verse forms… The Introduction clearly and elegantly lays out the issues -- and it is a pleasure to read, as are the individual essays collected here, written by many of the greatest critics of Victorian poetry writing today."
—Carolyn Williams, Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University 

“While Victorian Verse addresses major poets, particularly Christina Rossetti, it also shows how verse punctuated factory life, occupied physical space, filled periodicals, and wove into worship.…[This book] successfully gives readers a stirring new sense of a heretofore underestimated genre, and anyone who cares about Victorian daily life will find revelatory ideas in this collection.”
— Talia Schaffer, Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center & Queens College

Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life casts new light on nineteenth-century poetry by examining its popular verse forms and their surrounding social and media landscape. The volume offers insight into two central concepts of both the Victorian era and our own—status and taste—and how cultural hierarchies then and now were constructed and broken. By recovering the lost diversity of Victorian verse, this collection maps the breadth of Victorian writing and reading practices, illustrating how seemingly minor verse genres actually performed crucial social functions for Victorians, in education, leisure practices, the cultural production of class, and the formation of individual and communal identities. In addition to exploring lesser-known and even anonymous versifiers, the essays consider how “major” Victorian poets were also committed to writing and reading “minor” verse.

Lee Behlman is Associate Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Montclair State University.

Olivia Loksing Moy is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York, Lehman College.