Robert Browning

Mary Ellis Gibson and Britta Martens' "Browning's Bodies and the Body of Criticism" (VP 50 [2012]) provides an essential survey of current work in Browning studies. Gibson reviews four decades of U.S. and Canadian dissertations reported by Dissertation Abstracts, noting the contrast between 62 dissertations on Robert Browning completed between 1970-1979 to four dissertations on Browning between 2000-2009. It is this precipitous decline, despite the burgeoning of new archival research on Browning, that informs some of questions posed by Gibson and Martens to senior scholars as part of the important "Future Directions in Browning Studies" forum in Victorian Poetry (2012), marking the bicentenary of Browning's birth. I would add that the impact of faculty retirements, including those of senior Browning specialists, their non-replacements due to budget constraints in English Departments, together with marked pressures on the direction of humanities research from governments and funding bodies may also be part of this picture. Specialists in Victorian poetry and in Browning may well need to consider more public advocacy to make the case for the vital importance of their field both within university settings and to a broader public. Not to study Victorian poetry, classical poetry, any poetry, is to lose part of a deep history of human consciousness. Artists like Browning are the poet-coders of human experiences, and their writing, the reservoir of some of the most powerful analytical thinking ever produced. The study of their work, for researchers or students, is a training ground in ultra-creativity and in ethical thought. It is a loss to the students we educate at universities, whom we expect to think in complex ways in a networked world, a loss to future creative writers and to historians and analysts of texts, if the study of this aesthetic language declines and if the work of one of its most original practitioners does not continue to elicit powerful new readings or form part of new cultural, historical, or philosophical investigations.

The wealth of material published on Browning in his bicentenary year 2012 suggests what should be the ongoing vitality of Browning studies. It includes volumes from two major scholarly editions of Browning's poetry: vol. 4 of The Poems of Browning covering the years 1862-71(Pearson/Longman 2012), edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin, and Joseph Phelan and the final volume in The Complete Works of Robert Browning; with Variant Readings and Annotations (Ohio University Press/Baylor University 2012), edited by Ashby Bland Crowder and Allan C. Dooley. Both editions represent consummate historical and textual scholarship and complement each other in their respective approaches. The Pearson/Longman edition focuses on the poetry, including invaluable and accessible notes for each poem, presented with each work. The Ohio University edition is also richly annotated and covers all of Browning's published work in addition to the poems. What is interesting about this stage in the production of scholarly editions of Browning's poetry, including the most recently published volume in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (Oxford University Press), edited by Stefan Hawlin and Michael Meredith, is that authoritative editions of Browning's later poems, drawing on current archival research, are now available, material that, as Donald Hair and others have long contended, merits sustained critical attention. The long-term and equally massive research project represented by The Brownings' Correspondence (Wedgestone Press), of which volume 19 appears in 2012, will also serve to set the foundations for scholarship on Browning that makes full use of historical and textual research now available through these editions and as a result of the hard work and dedication of this group of editors and scholars.

The size and scope of Browning's oeuvre, together with its associated historical and cultural intertexts, raise issues of accessibility for scholars and general readers. The use of new digital media would seem a logical development in Browning studies, as a means of navigating this material as well as expanding the visibility of Browning to a broader public. Mary Ellis Gibson rightly reflects on the desirability of a "Browning Archive" that might involve a lead scholar or team of scholars, as...