This book is the definitive guide to Victorian poetry, which its
author approaches in the light of modern critical concerns and
contemporary contexts.
* Valentine Cunningham exhibits encyclopedic knowledge of the
poetry produced in this period and offers dazzling close readings
of a number of well-known poems
* Draws on the work of major Victorian poets and their
works as well as many of the less well-known poets and poems
* Reads poems and poets in the light of both Victorian and modern
critical concerns
* Places poetry in its personal, aesthetic, historical, and
ideological context
* Organized in terms of the Victorian anxieties of self, body,
and melancholy
* Argues that rhyming/repetition is the major formal feature of
Victorian poetry
* Highlights the Victorian obsession with small subjects in small
poems
* Shows how Victorian poetry attempts to engage with the modern
subject and how its modernity segues into modernism and
postmodernism
Spis treści
Preface vi
Part I: So Far as The Words Are Concerned 1
1 Words, Words, Words and More Words 3
2 Rhyming/Repeating 55
3 Making Noise/Noising Truths 73
4 These Rhyming/Repeating Games Are Serious 108
Part II: Contents and Discontents of The Forms 149
5 Down-Sizing 151
6 Selving 189
7 Fleshly Feelings 259
8 Mourning and Melancholia 323
9 Modernizing The Subject 409
10 Victorian Modernismus 463
Index 504
O autorze
Valentine Cunningham is Professor of English Language and Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His publications include Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (1975), In The Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History (Blackwell, 1994), The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (ed., Blackwell, 2000), and Reading After Theory (Blackwell, 2002).