This Companion brings together specially commissioned essays by distinguished international scholars that reflect both the diversity of Victorian poetry and the variety of critical approaches that illuminate it.

• Approaches Victorian poetry by way of genre, production and cultural context, rather than through individual poets or poems
  
• Demonstrates how a particular poet or poem emerges from a number of overlapping cultural contexts.
  
• Explores the relationships between work by different poets
  
• Recalls attention to a...

"Unfolding the South" presents a new vision of Anglo-Italian cultural relations in the late Romantic and Victorian periods. Responding to recent developments in the fields of literary criticism and art history, the book covers a stimulating range of canonical and non-canonical writers and artists. Eleven essays offer new perspectives on well-known figures such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Mary Shelley, together with discussions of writers and artists of newly-emerging importance.

The specially commissioned essays in Victorian Women Poets, written by scholars from Britain and North America, offer revisionary readings of canonical poets and bring into focus re-discovered writers. The volume both engages critically with the political and aesthetic agenda behind the project of recovery, and also presents a pioneering approach to reading poets who have slipped out of the canon. The work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti is re-assessed and given surprising and innovative literary, political and intellectual contexts that will change the way we interpret...

Based on a rich range of primary sources and manuscripts, A Rossetti Family Chronology breaks exciting new ground. Focusing on Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Chronolgy deomstrates the interconnectedness of their friendships and creativity, giving information about literary composition and artistic output, publication and exhibition, reviews, finances, relationships, health and detailing literary and artistic influences. Drawing on many unpublished sources, including family letters and diaries, this new volume in the Author Chronologies series will be of value to all students and...

This Companion brings together specially commissioned essays by distinguished international scholars that reflect both the diversity of Victorian poetry and the variety of critical approaches that illuminate it.

• Approaches Victorian poetry by way of genre, production and cultural context, rather than through individual poets or poems
  
• Demonstrates how a particular poet or poem emerges from a number of overlapping cultural contexts.
  
• Explores the relationships between work by different poets
  
• Recalls attention to a...

In this Readers' Guide, Alison Chapman introduces and discusses the patterns of critical attention that Gaskell's work has attracted across the past hundred and fifty years. Beginning with contemporary press and critical reviews, and treatments by the Victorian and early twentieth-century literary establishment, the Guide sets out a background for the most recent and challenging reassessments of these novels, bringing the reader fully up to date on current critical approaches.

In the pre-modern world saints and lords served structurally similar roles, acting as patrons to those beneath them on the spiritual or social ladder with the word 'patron' used to designate both types of elite sponsor. Alison Chapman argues that this elision of patron saints and patron lords remained a distinctive feature of the early modern English imagination and that it is central to some of the key works of literature in the period.

How did nineteenth-century women's poetry shift from the poetess poetry of lyric effusion and hyper-femininity to the muscular epic of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh? Networking the Nation re-writes women's poetic traditions by demonstrating the debt that Barrett Browning's revolutionary poetics owed to a circle of American and British women poets living in Florence and campaigning in their poetry and in their salons for Italian Unification. These women poets--Isa Blagden, Elizabeth Kinney, Eliza Ogilvy, and Theodosia Garrow Trollope--formed with Barrett Browning a network of...

Despite new historical study of her contexts, Christina Rossetti continues to haunt the reader as a displaced subjectivity emptied of history. Through an analysis of the posthumous in her work, the construction of 'Christina Rossetti' by her brothers, and the history of reception, this study asks how 'speaking with the dead' can avoid critical ventriloquy. The figure of the mother is offered as a paradigm for theorising a new reading that refuses to exorcise the ghost of 'Christina Rossetti'.

Through an analysis of the posthumous in her work, the construction of "Christina Rossetti" by her brothers, and the history of reception, this study asks how "speaking with the dead" can avoid critical ventriloquy.