Guide to the Year's Work: General Materials

Christopher M. Keirstead begins his Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism by imagining "an Atlas of Victorian Poetry" (p. 1) that could represent the complex internationality of the British verse we study. It turns out that the adjective "Victorian" has displaced our understanding of the many ways this poetry looked beyond the borders of the nation, and indeed was called forth by a desire to imagine a broader Anglo-European community. Recognizing that poetry tends toward national identity by virtue of its linguistic investments, Keirstead argues that, nevertheless, nineteenth-century British poets were deeply engaged with Europe and cosmopolitanism: their art was shaped by their concern for Britain's cultural relationship to "the ever-impending Europe of the future" (p. 3), with a distinct focus on France and Italy. Moreover, they worked to sustain poetry itself as a powerful and distinct agent of cosmopolitanism amid the other unifying forces of the century, particularly communication technologies, scientific advancements, and the marketplace. Yet Keirstead shows that poets such as Arnold, the Brownings, Clough, and Morris were also always challenged by the idea of cosmopolitanism; and they struggled profoundly with poetry's role in promoting the dream of a unified Europe. Matthew Arnold is a key presence in the critical narrative, a figure devoted to broad international ideas of culture who abandoned poetry but not before laying down paths for encounters with Europe that others would follow. Barrett Browning will step boldly here, offering in her work a politically and religiously inflected vision of an international community dependent on poets and artists; one might say she emerges as the heroine of this study. A chapter on Clough shows how Amours de Voyage offers only a cosmopolitanism of negation, depicting as it does the post-national flaneur disillusioned and lost in an unredeemed Europe. Robert Browning is presented as a border-crossing figure whose poetry "sought to enter into the varieties of European national consciousness" (p. 27); Keirstead gives particular emphasis to the little-studied Red Cotton Night-Cap Country and the complex figuring of Anglo-French relations he finds there. A chapter on Swinburne argues that "Europe" and "France" serve the poet primarily as "discursive entities" that allow for radical cross-cultural imaginings of sex and gender—and provoked charges of dangerous "continental" decadence. Kierstad reads Morris' Icelandic and Nordic poetry as offering "a sort of post-racial aestheticism" (p. 30) that looks to the past for an ideal of a unified European culture. The book concludes with a reading of Thomas Hardy's Dynasts as a late imagining of Europe as a "drama of nations" shaped by the Immanent Will. Taken together, these chapters offer a compelling and wide-ranging account of the aesthetic, spiritual, and political aspects of cosmopolitanism in Victorian poetry, as the idea of a unified Europe was tested, critiqued, refined, and rewritten as a set of risks that poetry, and really all of us, might take.

In Lives of the Sonnet, 1787-1895: Genre, Gender and Criticism, Marianne Van Remoortel continues the robust tradition of recent work on the sonnet (by Jennifer Wagner, James Phelan, and Amy Billone, among others) with a study of the gendering—indeed, the ascribed femininity—of the genre itself in the long nineteenth century. Verse by male and female poets receives equal attention here, as the book focuses on the development of a discursive culture that put gender at the center of the conversation about the sonnet. Rather than presenting a comprehensive survey of the genre in this period, Van Remoortel instead proceeds by way of several case studies, with particular emphasis on the history of the critical conversation up to and including twenty-first century criticism. The second half of Lives of the Sonnet—focused on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Meredith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Augusta Webster—will be of most interest to the readers of Victorian Poetry, after early chapters on 1) the commodification of the sonnet in the eighteenth-century periodical The World (1787-94), 2) the Della Cruscan sonnet as a battleground for the feminization of the genre, and 3) the pre...