The discussion of each poem attends to the complexity of the poem's utterance, its historical contexts, and its broader implications for cultural meaning.Victorian Literature and Culture Series

With the publication of his ambitious new work Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture, Antony H. Harrison continues his exploration of poetry as a significant force in the construction of English culture from 1837-1900. In chapters focusing on Victorian medievalist discourse, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Christina Rossetti, Harrison examines a range of Victorian poems in order to show the cultural work they accomplish. He illuminates, for example, such culturally prominent Victorian mythologies as the exaltation of motherhood, the Romanic appropriation of transcendent art, and the idealization of the gypsy as a culturally alien, exotic Other. His investigation of the ways in which the authors intervene in the discourses that articulate such mythologies and thereby accrue cultural power--along with his analysis of what constitutes "cultural power"--are original contributions to the field of Victorian studies. "The power of Victorian poetry by midcentury was enhanced by the institutionalization of particular channels through which it circulated," Harrison writes. "poetry was 'consumed' in more varied forms than was other literature." Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture has implications for both cultural studies and the study of literature outside the Victorian period.

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation argues that the dialectic and dynamic relationship between the periodical review and poetry creates a culture of evaluation which shapes Victorian poetic form. The mediation of poetry by the periodical review orients poets towards public readership and reception, heightening their self-consciousness about their audience and generating a poetics of publicness. Using methodologies associated with historical poetics and new formalism, the book examines the dialogues between poets and periodical reviews from the 1830s to the 1860s. It juxtaposes male and female poets and canonical and uncanonical texts. Challenging the critical binaries of fame and celebrity, the culture of evaluation posits a new way of reading Victorian poetry. It illuminates poets' engagement with the immediacy and inevitability of writing for the present and for the contemporary media through which poetry was read and disseminated. New patterns of reception were created by mass print culture and both poets and reviewers were preoccupied with reaching the newly constituted mass audience. The changes to the material forms of poetry (e.g. through the periodical or gift-book) and the subjection to the commercial imperatives of the literary marketplace encouraged bold experiment with verse. The book identifies three poetic strategies for articulating the preoccupation with a mass audience and the demands of mass media: voice, style and address. Chapters on voice, style, and address explore the development of poetic form in dialogue with periodical reviews.

In a work that is uniquely comprehensive and theoretically astute, Isobel Armstrong rescues Victorian poetry from its longstanding sepia image as `a moralised form of romantic verse', and unearths its often subversive critique of nineteenth-century culture and politics.

Introduces the poetry of the Victorian era (including writers like Browning, Rossetti and Tennyson) and its social, cultural and political contexts.

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 considerable body of poetry that has fallen into neglect Essays are informed by recent developments in textual and cultural theory Considers Victorian women poets in every chapter

This Companion to Victorian Poetry provides an introduction to many of the pressing issues that absorbed the attention of poets from the 1830s to the 1890s. It introduces readers to a range of topics - including historicism, patriotism, prosody, and religious belief. The thirteen specially-commissioned chapters offer insights into the works of well-known figures such as Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and the writings of women poets - like Michael Field, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster - whose contribution to Victorian culture has in more recent years been acknowledged by modern scholars. Revealing the breadth of the Victorians' experiments with poetic form, this Companion also discloses the extent to which their writings addressed the prominent intellectual and social questions of the day. The volume, which will be of interest to scholars and students alike, features a detailed chronology of the Victorian period and a comprehensive guide to further reading.