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Victorian Poetry 41.4 (2003) 459-463



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Introduction


        where shall we know . . .
Sign-marks to guide us on the way we go?
—Augusta Webster, "To-Day"
Whirr—whirr—gone!
And still we hurry on.
—William Allingham, "Express"

In December 1999 I proposed this special issue to Hayden Ward during a Victorian Poetry reception at MLA in Chicago. The special issue originated as a millennial project, impelled by my sense that, as Augusta Webster's "To-Day" articulates, future paths were unclear and that Victorian poetry scholars might fruitfully consider new "sign-marks" for further study. By the time Hayden and I conferred about the issue's production schedule at the December 2002 MLA in New York, just after the memorable session devoted to Isobel Armstrong's work, the world had changed more than I or anyone else might have guessed. That sense of fundamental change, as well as the bustle of MLA and the professional machinery that hurries academic scholars forward even as we try to rethink larger issues, underlie my second epigraph, drawn from William Allingham's evocation of an express train.

"Whither Victorian Poetry" differs from most of the journal's special issues in that it is conceived as a casebook of collective brainstorming rather than as a culled set of full-length scholarly articles. The issue's design requires essays short enough to make reading the entire contents feasible (and inviting) to readers, yet long enough to illustrate individual approaches. The purpose of the special issue—to stimulate fresh thought about ways we might conceive and reconfigure the field—also underlies its format. Rather than organizing essays by categories of approach, I have arranged them as an extended dialogue, one essay engaging or questioning the next.

To set that dialogue in motion, I have invited essays from those who literally embody the future of Victorian poetry studies, younger scholars who have begun work in the field and will largely shape the discipline for the next thirty years. To identify contributors, I sought nominations from established scholars in the U.S., U.K., and Australia. The resulting twenty-five [End Page 459] contributors have in some cases already made their marks with first books or essays noted in "This Year's Work"; others' first books are just appearing; and some are graduate students who make their scholarly debut in this issue. All have responded inventively to my request for work in an unconventional genre—the scholarly "sketch," which here ranges from the speculative and informal to distillations of large-scale work.

In the paragraphs that follow I preview the issue's contents, but this overlay should be thought of only as a highly selective "trailer" that constructs one narrative thread out of numerous possibilities. To appreciate the range and richness of this "casebook," readers need to engage the whole directly. I open, then, with Erik Gray's essay since his call for a less "Bounded Field" strikes a kind of keynote for the issue and his reservations about studying Michael Field within the category of "women poets" (rather than the sister arts or classical tradition) an appropriately provocative note. Lee O'Brien defends continued study of women poets as a group unto themselves (and of the forgotten as outsiders) while proposing that biographical study be displaced in favor of attention to women poets' intricate intertextuality. O'Brien emphasizes the performativity of poet Mary Boddington's mimicry of poetic genres; Anne Hartman suggests that form itself be conceptualized in terms of performativity, since (as an extension of Isobel Armstrong's "double poem") form can be conceptualized as performing while interrogating cultural norms. Both Hartman and O'Brien apply models of performativity to women poets. Dino Felluga's interest in transgressive genres, and in genre as a site of negotiation, leads him to advocate setting poems alongside realist novels to examine the cultural ideologies both perform, often in response to each other and market forces. Monique Morgan concurs with Felluga that Victorian poetry and fiction should be studied interactively, but she emphasizes narratological theory as the means to understand their relation and the degree to which a given theory can encompass...

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