I. Dualities -- Christina Rossetti's Echoes: Eros and the Victorian Double Poem / Stephanie L. Johnson -- The Revival of Courtly Love 1850-1870: Allegory, Anachronism, and Violence / Matthew Rowlinson -- Love Charms / Herbert F. Tucker -- The Erotics of Sprung Rhythm / Erik Gray -- II. Courtship and Marriage -- Love on the Factory Floor: Working-Class Poets and Factory Courtship Verse / Kirstie Blair -- All on the threshold: Christina Rossetti's Revisionary Epithalamia / Pearl Chaozon Bauer -- The Mathematics of Marriage: Augusta Webster's Combinatory and Fractional Intimacy / Amy Kahrmann Huseby -- III. Beyond Erotic Intimacy -- Intimacy and the Neologistic Imagination in Hardy and Hopkins / Veronica Alfano -- The Secret History of the Sonnet: The Poetics of Maternal Love in Augusta Webster's Mother and Daughter / Josie Billington -- The Poetics of Cross-Species Love / Julia F. Saville -- Yeats' Intimacies / Francis O'Gorman.
Summary:
"Many of the greatest love poems in English date from the Victorian period, yet this is the first scholarly book in decades to consider the whole range of Victorian love poetry by authors such as Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Augusta Webster, Thomas Hardy, and William Butler Yeats. It includes contributions by many of the leading scholars of Victorian poetry"-- Provided by publisher. "British literature of the Victorian period has always been celebrated for the quality, innovativeness, and sheer profusion of its love poetry. Every major Victorian poet produced notable poems about love. This includes not only canonical figures, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti, but also lesser-known poets whose works have only recently become widely recognized and studied, such as Augusta Webster and the many often anonymous working-class poets whose verses filled the pages of popular periodicals. Modern critics have claimed, convincingly, that love poetry is not just one strain of Victorian poetry among many; it is arguably its representative, even definitive, mode. This collection of essays reconsiders the Victorian poetry of love and, just as importantly, of intimacy-a more inclusive term that comprehends not only romance but love for family, for God, for animals, and for language itself. Together the essays seek to define a poetics of intimacy that arose during the Victorian period and that continues today, a set of poetic structures and strategies by which poets can represent and encode feelings of love. There exist many studies of intimate relations (especially marriage) in Victorian novels. But although poetry rivals the novel in the depth and diversity of its treatment of love, marriage, and intimacy, that aspect of Victorian verse has remained underexamined. Love among the Poets offers an expansive critical overview. With its slate of distinguished contributors, including scholars from the US, Canada, Britain, and Australia, the volume is a wide-ranging account of this vital era of poetry and of its importance for the way we continue to write, love, and live today"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.