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  • General Materials
  • Albert D. Pionke (bio)

Six books appear in the general material section. The five monographs cover a wide range, from an unexpected approach to prosodic history to two complementary volumes on long and short poems, respectively, to the poetry brought to and produced within English-speaking emigrant colonies, to the at times sado-sexual language of Victorian religious poetry. Three essays from a larger collection on British working-class literature enlarge the conceptual frame still further and help to round out this year’s productively general survey of Victorian poetic possibilities.

Provocatively “extending its discursive purchase beyond the more traditional locus of humanistic inquiry,” Jason David Hall’s Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) “examines the ways in which machine culture impacted on fundamental conceptions of what poetic meter was and how it worked” (p. 2). As does Carlyle in “Signs of Times” (1829)—cited as early as p. 1—Hall metonymically enlarges the meaning of “machine” to encompass both literal (the Euphonia automaton) and figurative (Patmore’s New Prosody), institutional (schoolboy Gradus grinding) and individual (phrenological analysis of Tennyson’s poetic head) phenomena. A similarly capacious definition of “meter” prevails: “meter as understood here denotes considerably more than a pattern of stress or accent in a given line of poetry. . . . [I]magine it as a set of processes including meter as idea or abstraction, as a mental or physiological predisposition or experience, or as a practice or habit of reading or pedagogical instruction” (p. 3). Rather than devoting its energies to “close readings of poems by major Victorian poets,” the book instead “focuses on how particular nineteenth-century ‘technologies’—namely, education, manufacture, and experimental science—effected the ‘manipulation’ of language in the forms of prosody, versification, and rhythm through concrete practices and techniques such as speech instruction and acoustical analysis—in a few cases by means of an actual machine” (pp. 3, 6). Hall’s five unnumbered chapters present a series of interconnected case studies illustrating the Victorians’ often mechanically inflected approach to metrical [End Page 287] thinking. “Measurement, Temporality, Abstraction” examines Coventry Patmore’s “Essay on English Metrical Law” (1857) in “relation to three iconic technologies of the age—the railway, the telegraph, and the steam thresher” (p. 18). This is followed by “Meter Manufactories,” which reconstructs the eighty years of “education methods and experimental teaching practices” concerned with Latin composition, whose mania for syllabic disassembly and interchangeable phonetic parts connects “nineteenth-century liberal curriculum” with “the nineteenth-century factory system” (p. 63). At the heart of Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology, bibliographically but also intellectually and even affectively, is the chapter entitled “Automaton Versifier,” in which Hall uses John Clark’s Eureka machine—constructed to produce perfect, if metrically monotonous, hexameters—to interrogate Victorian ideas of “work, diversion, automation, and intelligence” (p. 113). Brought into “direct and prolonged contact with this truly amazing apparatus” by a grant-supported project dedicated to its conservation and return to working order, Hall provides a fascinatingly detailed account of its inner workings and its prescient anticipations of modern debates over machine intelligence (p. 256). The book’s remaining two chapters, “The Automatic Flow of Verse” and “Instrumental Prosody,” concern themselves with broadly scientific, including medical, and more specifically audiological approaches to meter, respectively. Whether phrenologist, elocutionist, audiologist, physiologist, or psychologist, Hall asserts, “the ‘fact’ of meter’s manifestation—whether intended or not—was a productive site of analysis at the intersection of literary and scientific perspectives” (p. 197). Unfortunately for these more scientific prosodists, however, even when measured by a kymograph, the “materiality of voiced rhythm and the abstraction of the metrical modulus refused to find resolution in a unified verse theory” (p. 242).

Although its sometimes exuberant pentameters do not appear at all in Hall’s text, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) looms large in The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017) by Stephanie Markovits. Not only does EBB’s midcentury chef d’oeuvre provide the book’s subtitle, first literary reference, and most prominent (if problematic) generic exemplar, Aurora Leigh also functions as argumentative infrastructure, the primary load-bearing text on which to...

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