While feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s celebrated the work's vividly embodied imagery, a more recent critical interest in the so-called Spasmodic school of poetry, with its focus on ...sensations, rhythms, and pulses, has further emphasized the central role of women's physical experience in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic.1 Such analyses magnify Aurora's desire to craft a poetry that will express her own "full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age. While Blair and Rudy analyze the spiritual underpinnings of Barrett Browning's relation between poetics and the body, LaPorte has shown how Aurora Leigh "genders prophecy and poetry" in ways reminiscent of related scholarship that foregrounds Aurora's connections to Victorian sage discourse.3 Like these works, this essay sets out from the premise that Aurora Leigh bases its poetics on a creative attachment to language's divine potential, one that upholds an incarnational poetics to unite the material and spiritual realms.4 Embodiment and disembodiment in Aurora Leigh dialectically transform each other, at times informing Aurora's desire for detached contemplation, at other times realizing her eager bodily longing for a Christ to descend and "straighten out / The leathery tongue turned back into the throat" (V.108-109).
Susan Redington Bobby, whose specializations include fairy tale studies and adolescent literature, and who has also published a review essay on fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes's work for Marvels and ...Tales, a peer-reviewed journal of fairy tale studies, has gathered a fascinating collection of essays; these essays seize you from the beginning and urge you to read on-much like the fairy tales they analyze. Fairy tales really weren't focused on kids until the Victorian age when there was a major shift towards marketing these classic and rather gruesome tales for children-especially for young girls as a mode for learning manners and social norms. Yet, this was the only "bad apple" in the entire bunch, which is rather rare in a collection of this sort. ...Fairy Tales Reimagined is a novel work. Snow White, The Goose Girl, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Thumbelina, Cinderella, Sun Moon and Talia, Peter Pan, and Alice in Wonderland, along with many of the new renditions of those classic tales:
Combines historical rigour with an analysis of dramatic contexts, themes and forms
The 17 contributors explore the longstanding and vibrant Scottish dramatic tradition and the important developments ...in Scottish dramatic writing and theatre, with particular attention to the last 100 years.
The first part of the volume covers Scottish drama from the earliest records to the late twentieth-century literary revival, as well as translation in Scottish theatre and non-theatrical drama. The second part focuses on the work of influential Scottish playwrights, from J. M. Barrie and James Bridie to Ena Lamont Stewart, Liz Lochhead and Edwin Morgan and right up to contemporary playwrights Anthony Neilson, Gregory Burke, Henry Adams and Douglas Maxwell.
Key Features
Provides a thorough overview of Scottish theatre from the earliest days to the presentDeals with play texts as well as with the key contexts and themes of drama and theatre over the yearsProvides insights into the work of leading Scottish playwrights, including the new generations since the 1970s
First published in the third edition of Elegiac Sonnets in 1786, they memorialize locally-born poets William Collins, William Hayley, and Thomas Otway, and demonstrate that Smith was interested both ...in the history of her Surrey homeland and in the poet's role as chronicler of local legends. For one, Greg Kucich argues that the alternative, more individuated historiographical model embraced by female writers had less to do with establishing women as a separately legitimate group, and more to do with fostering feelings of community that transcended barriers of gender, class, and nationality.43 In their historical accounts, early Romantic women writers constructed "communities of marginalized victims whose pointed divisions-republicans and royalists, peasants and nobles, wives and statesmen-dissolve amid their shared suffering," according to Kucich.44 From Smith's letters, we know that she could be defiantly independent-minded when it came to her own position amid any contemporary group of writers, but Elegiac Sonnets illustrates that she was also a woman of her time, at least regarding the trend toward community-building histories.45 In the spirit of the age, the Arun sonnets constitute a peculiar history in verse, for they are as invested in uniting the unfamed sons and daughters of Sensibility, the present-day descendants of her memorialized figures, as they are in older traditions of local historical description.
When Robert Louis Stevenson's Ballads appeared in 1890, reviewers complained both about his decision to base two of the poems on Pacific legends, and about his ballads' versification. This essay ...places Stevenson's volume in the context of the late Victorian ballad revival, looking variously at poems by John Davidson, John Todhunter, and W. B. Yeats. It then argues that Stevenson does not simply match the ballad's ancient or naive poetics to the so-called savages of the South Seas, but instead that his prosody struggles with incompatible social and aesthetic values: both ancient and modern, naivete and sophistication. A focus on poetics thus illuminates the political contradictions of these poems of empire.
The Savile Club prided itself in being more relaxed and friendly than most other gentlemen’s clubs in London in the second half of the nineteenth century, welcoming ‘men of promise’ at the start of ...their careers. Robert Louis Stevenson, one of these young men of promise, relished the social opportunities of the club, especially the company of fellow bohemians but was also aware of the limitations of the club, and its potential for complacency and false posturing. His novella ‘The Suicide Club’, depicting a club similar to the Savile, satirises the artificiality of the club, and of all such clubs, and of the superficial respectability of the members’ bohemian pretensions, which shelter the ‘gentlemen’ from a genuine and fulfilling engagement in the battlefield of life.
This Introduction analyzes the rise of twentieth-century Shakespeare as a reaction against not only Romantic versions of Shakespeare, the usual target of academic analysis after T. S. Eliot, but also ...feminine, and often feminist, approaches to Shakespeare produced by women actors, artists, and authors in the nineteenth century. These women, in turn, engage not just with the nationalist figure of King Shakespeare, as epitomized by Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, but also with one another in networks that are sometimes personal, sometimes dispersed.
Representations of perpetual boyhood came to fascinate the late Victorians, partly because such images could naturalize a new spirit of imperial aggression and new policies of preserving power. This ...article traces the emergence of this fantasy through a series of stories about the relationship of the boy and the pirate, figures whose opposition in mid-Victorian literature was used to articulate the moral legitimacy of colonialism, but who became doubles rather than antitheses in later novels, such as R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island and Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. Masculine worth needed no longer to be measured by reference to transcendent, universal laws, but by a morally flexible ethic of competitive play, one that bound together boyishness and piracy in a satisfying game of international adventure.
Henry Raeburn, a major late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British artist, has received insufficient critical scrutiny. His little-known group of portraits of the Fraser family of Reelig is ...dominated by representations of the adolescent male sons. In the context of this Scottish Highland family's temporal and geographic dislocation around the British Empire, these portraits were both present and prescient. As a fundamental expectation of portraiture, likeness was the dominant affective category in the lived reality of the British Empire.
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