Elizabeth Helsinger's iconoclastic book explores the peculiar power of rural England to stand for conflicting ideas of Britain. Despite the nostalgic appeal of Constable's or Tennyson's rural scenes, ...they record the severe social and economic disturbances of the turbulent years after Waterloo. Artists and writers like Cobbett, Clare, Turner, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot competed to claim the English countryside as ideological ground. No image of rural life produced consensus over the great questions: who should constitute the nation, and how should they be represented? Helsinger ponders how some images of rural life and land come to serve as national metaphors while others challenge their constructions of Englishness at the heart of the British Empire.
Drawing on recent work in social history, nationalism, and geography, as well as the visual and literary arts, Helsinger recovers other possible and alternative readings of social ties embedded in the imagery of land. She reflects on the power of rural images to transfer local loyalties to the national scene, first popularizing then institutionalizing them. By turning a critical gaze on these scenes, she comments on the difference between art and ideology, and the problems and dangers of asserting any kind of national identity through imagery of the land.
Originally published in 1996.
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In arguing for the crucial importance of song for poets in the long nineteenth century, Elizabeth Helsinger focuses on both the effects of song on lyric forms and the mythopoetics through which poets ...explored the affinities of poetry with song. Looking in particular at individual poets and poems, Helsinger puts extensive close readings into productive conversation with nineteenth-century German philosophic and British scientific aesthetics. While she considers poets long described as "musical"-Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Emily Brontë, and Algernon Charles Swinburne-Helsinger also examines the more surprising importance of song for those poets who rethought poetry through the medium of visual art: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Christina Rossetti. In imitating song's forms and sound textures through lyric's rhythm, rhyme, and repetition, these poets were pursuing song's "thought" in a double sense. They not only asked readers to think of particular kinds of song as musical sound in social performance (ballads, national airs, political songs, plainchant) but also invited readers to think like song: to listen to the sounds of a poem as it moves minds in a different way from philosophy or science. By attending to the formal practices of these poets, the music to which the poets were listening, and the stories and myths out of which each forged a poetics that aspired to the condition of music, Helsinger suggests new ways to think about the nature and form of the lyric in the nineteenth century.
What Is This Thing Called Song? Helsinger, Elizabeth
Modern language quarterly (Seattle),
12/2018, Letnik:
79, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
What is a song? As a literary term,
had acquired particular historical meanings for poets writing in English by the mid-nineteenth century. The ballad and song revival of the late eighteenth and ...early nineteenth centuries reawakened interest not only in traditional ballads but in nonnarrative songs, both popular and elite—especially the songs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For poets writing in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, song, in the literary sense, was an inherited tradition exercising a strong countering pressure against the temptation to regard all lyric poems as first-person expressions of subjective feeling.
What Is Thing Thing Called Song? Helsinger, Elizabeth
Modern language quarterly (Seattle),
12/2018, Letnik:
79, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The literary term song acquired historical meanings for poets writing in English by the mid-nineteenth century. This development dates back to the reawakened interest in traditional ballads and ...nonnarrative songs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. How songs acted as an inherited tradition for poets writing in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century is also described.
CONVERSING IN VERSE HELSINGER, ELIZABETH
ELH,
12/2017, Letnik:
84, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
What does it mean to converse in verse? Stichomythia, where two characters alternate lines or pairs of lines in classical Greek drama, is also, perhaps surprisingly, a frequent feature of nineteenth ...century popular and literary lyric poems. One probably source is the ballad, where events are often narrated wholly in dialogue. I focus on two Victorian poets in whose work ballads were a strong presence, asking not only what each poet found in the ballad but what each did with the modes of sociability at its core. What happens when we consider Christina Rossetti's devotional poems from the perspective of her ballad pastiches? Or think of Thomas Hardy's elegies for Emma Hardy in light of the "ballad expectations" aroused by his poems--expectations attached, among other things, to his frequent use of conversational dialogue?
