Traditionally the scene of some of London’s poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods, the East End of London has long been misunderstood as abject and deviant. As a landing place for migrants and ...newcomers, however, it has also been memorably and colorfully represented in the literature of Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. In Strangers in the Archive, Heidi Kaufman applies the resources of archives both material and digital to move beyond icon and stereotype to reveal a deeper understanding of East End literature and culture in the Victorian age.
Kaufman uncovers this engaging new perspective on the East End through Maria Polack’s Fiction without Romance (1830), the first novel to be published by an English Jew, and through records of Polack’s vibrant community. Although scholars of nineteenth-century London and readers of East End fictions persist in privileging sensational narratives of Jack the Ripper and the infamous Fagin the Jew as signs of universal depravity among East End minority ethnic and racial groups, Strangers in the Archive considers how archival materials are uniquely capable of redressing cultural silences and marginalized perspectives as well as reshaping conceptions of the global significance of literary and print culture in nineteenth-century London.
Many of this book’s subjects—including digital editions of rare books and manuscript diaries, multimedia maps, and other related East End print records—can be viewed online at the Lyon Archive and the Polack Archive.
Because some diffidence about the principle of their coordination will commit me to balancing on each for a while independently, let me forswear suspense and divulge right away the hinge on which the ...following argument will pivot.
Verse Visa TUCKER, HERBERT F.
Nineteenth-century literature,
03/2018, Letnik:
72, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Dick Swiveller’s hilariously eclectic misquotation of popular verse coexists with Dickens’s own grave proclivity to fall into unlineated yet ...incantatory blank verse when orchestrating the death of Little Nell. These complementary prose effects freshly showcase the novelist’s joint commitments to humorous and pathetic renditions of the modern condition. They also underscore the coalescence of the novel as such, circa 1840, out of a miscellany of barely compatible ingredients, as the still-burgeoning genre sought to displace, whether by sidelining or by incorporation, poetry’s millennial prestige.
While the latter yields the ethical and political complexity we have come to prize in Webster, that ideological yield lies at constant risk of distortion through neglect of the former. Because ...poetry, especially dramatic poetry, does not just contain its ideas but performs them, any Webster poem worth more than one reading is likely to reward the inquirer with the disclosure of more than one way to imagine its words meant and said. ...the telltale "but" in line 114 and the hypogrammatical, self-depreciating (while still metrically trim) placement of "just" in the tongue-twisting line that follows. 4 See Melissa Valiska Gregory's judgment, in recent pages of this journal, that the "individual poems have yet to be carefully read, parsed, and discussed," her assertion of "the relevance of close reading to recovery" of disregarded women writers, and her call "to zero in on the details before pulling back," in order to "illuminate the centrality of genre and formalism to feminism": "Augusta Webster Writing Motherhood in the Dramatic Monologue and the Sonnet Sequence," VP 49, no. 1 (2011): 48-49. See, for example, H. Buxton Forman, Our Living Poets (1871; repr., New York: Garland, 1986), pp. 177-178, for Forman's discussion of Annunciata's capacity for self-deception. 12 Rigg sees how the speaker's "dramatic tension" derives "from her attempts to balance her conviction that a plain girl is worth less than a beautiful girl with her resistance to the social forces that, in reinforcing this conviction, unfairly determine her life," and how this tension "blurs the boundary between social censure and self-imposed criticism" (pp. 94-95).
Poetic Force: Poetry After Kant Tucker, Herbert F
Victorian Studies,
09/2016, Letnik:
59, Številka:
1
Book Review, Journal Article
Recenzirano
...though, the interest here centers not on poems, but on poetry, approached less as a literary kind or medium than as a proving ground for high-energy thought experiments in post-Kantian aesthetics, ...whose flashpoint lies at the intersection between linguistic deconstruction and the philosophy of mind.
Formalism Tucker, Herbert F.
Victorian literature and culture,
2018, Letnik:
46, Številka:
3-4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Just now routinized contextualism is in retreat before a rising generation of scholars who don't merely pay court to form as a matter of principle, or summon it to ice an argument already baked, but ...actively devise new tools of formal analysis whereby to generate arguments in the first place. The latest struggles arose a couple of decades ago, at least for nineteenth-century studies they did, and as usual they were waged in the first instance by Romanticists—Susan Wolfson (1997), Marshall Brown (2000, 2006), Marjorie Levinson (2007)—who pushed back against a shopworn Historicism that was so far from New that it was cheapening monographs, overrunning conferences, and stultifying classrooms.1 By the time Levinson could invite PMLA readers to ponder what the “New Formalism” was, the tide had turned, in a direction that the honorific plural in a 2013 title like New Formalisms and Literary Theory placed beyond doubt.2 As for the wounds, they tell a much older story. Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Wolfson and Marshall Brown, eds., a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000), and Reading for Form (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Marjorie Levinson, “ What Is New Formalism? ” PMLA 122 (2007): 558 –69.
The meter of a poem is to its rhythm as a composed score is to its performance and also as a text is to its interpretation, whether one takes interpretation in its hermeneutic, written sense or in ...the sense of an experienced vocalization--whether, that is, one takes it into the library or into the auditorium, the literate domain or the oral. Now the practice of scansion, or prosodic textual markup, by its very nature participates in both these domains. As a visible notation of an imagined performative utterance, for which it serves concurrently as record and as guide, scansion both confesses and exposes that acoustic nostalgia which has inhabited the printed voice in its virtual orality ever since poems first fell from the air onto the page. Arguably since manuscript antiquity, and decidedly since the Renaissance inauguration of print, competent reading of verse has depended on a regular interplay between the visual and the aural mode (the latter nearly always entailing its homonym, the oral mode) of verbal experience. Scansion is a highly artificial technique that engages all three modes, really, but the first two especially. Here, Tucker examines the two musician monologues from Robert Browning's 1855 collection Men and Women: "A Toccata of Galuppi's" and "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha."
Mathilde Blind Diedrick, James; Stauffer, Andrew; Tucker, Herbert F
12/2016
eBook
WithMathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters,James Diedrick offers a groundbreaking critical biography of the German-born British poet Mathilde Blind (1841-1896), a ...freethinking radical feminist.
Born to politically radical parents, Blind had, by the time she was thirty, become a pioneering female aesthete in a mostly male community of writers, painters, and critics, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, Ford Madox Brown, William Michael Rossetti, and Richard Garnett. By the 1880s she had become widely recognized for a body of writing that engaged contemporary issues such as the Woman Question, the forced eviction of Scottish tenant farmers in the Highland Clearances, and Darwin's evolutionary theory. She subsequently emerged as a prominent voice and leader among New Woman writers at the end of the century, including Mona Caird, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Katharine Tynan. She also developed important associations with leading male decadent writers of the fin de siècle, most notably, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons.
Despite her extensive contributions to Victorian debates on aesthetics, religion, nationhood, imperialism, gender, and sexuality, however, Blind has yet to receive the prominence she deserves in studies of the period. As the first full-length biography of this trailblazing woman of letters,Mathilde Blindunderscores the importance of her poetry and her critical writings (her work on Shelley, biographies of George Eliot and Madame Roland, and her translations of Strauss and Bashkirtseff) for the literature and culture of the fin de siècle.
The first biography of the trailblazing poet and essayist Mathilde Blind, a freethinking radical feminist ahead of her time in late-Victorian London.
When Ezra Pound, halfway between Browning's time and Bidart's, defined poetry as the news that stays news, he was setting against mere novelty's decay the perennially strange-making durability with ...which a stroke of art can embed subject matter in form ( ABC of Reading 29).4 Still and all, that preservative feat remains easier said than done. ...in a climactic fleshing-out of that self/world relatedness which is the dramatic monologue's abiding generative theme, each poet's greatest work confronts head-on the burden of history.9 The ways in which Guido, Caponsacchi, Pompilia and the Pope in The Ring and the Book lift or shed this burden form strands in the poet's own fabric for sustaining the duties of historical consciousness - duties that Bidart for his part unsparingly levies, and lavishly pays, through the modern footwork of that astonishing 1983 performance "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky." Numbered instructions for stump bandaging in "The Arc," notes duly filed by clinical staff members on the inscrutable anorexia of the hospitalized "Ellen West," biographical excerpts from long-suffering Romola Nijinsky, bound by wedlock to a genius unhinged from her by madness, all serve as prose foils setting the verse off by a technique now nearly standard. Langbaum's insistence on the particular perspective of dramatic monologue speakers in the Browning tradition anticipated patterns of thought that proved focal for new historicism at century's end: its binaries of personal agency and governing context were his expressive and situational (subjective and objective) frames of reference newly labeled. 10 The phrase Bidart quotes is Robert Frost's, and it serves as centerpiece to the essential collection On Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page, ed.
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