Title: Victorian poets and the politics of culture : discourse and ideology /
Authors: Harrison, Antony H.
Publisher: Univerisity Press of Virginia,
Year: 1998
Subjects: Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Political and social views.; Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, Political and social views.; Arnold, Matthew, Political and social views.; Rossetti, Christina Georgina, Political and social views.; English poetry History and criticism; Politics and literature Great Britain History; Culture Political aspects Great Britain History; Medievalism England History; Discourse analysis, Literary.; Politics and culture Great Britain History; Great Britain History
Abstract: With the publication of his ambitious new work Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture, Antony H. Harrison continues his exploration of poetry as a significant force in the construction of English culture from 1837-1900. In chapters focusing on Victorian medievalist discourse, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Christina Rossetti, Harrison examines a range of Victorian poems in order to show the cultural work they accomplish. He illuminates, for example, such culturally prominent Victorian mythologies as the exaltation of motherhood, the Romanic appropriation of transcendent art, and the idealization of the gypsy as a culturally alien, exotic Other. His investigation of the ways in which the authors intervene in the discourses that articulate such mythologies and thereby accrue cultural power -- along with his analysis of what constitutes "cultural power"--Are original contributions to the field of Victorian studies. "The power of Victorian poetry by midcentury was enhanced by the institutionalization of particular channels through which it circulated," Harrison writes. "poetry was 'consumed' in more varied forms than was other literature." Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture has implications for both cultural studies and the study of literature outside the Victorian period. - Publisher.
Contents: Introduction: discourse, ideology, poetry -- Medievalist discourse and the ideologies of Victorian poetry -- Merlin and Tennyson: poetry of power and Victorian self-fashioning -- Elizabeth Barret in 1838: "weakness like omnipotence" -- Matthew Arnold's gipsies: ideology and the discourse of the other -- Christina Rossetti: renunciation as intervention.