A.C. Swinburne and the singing word
Subtitle: new perspectives on the mature work
By: edited by Yisrael Levin.
Contributors: Levin, Yisrael.
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Burlington, VT
Language: eng
Number of pages: 190
ISBN-13: 9780754669968; 9781409403722
Subjects: Swinburne, Algernon Charles, -- 1837-1909 -- Criticism and interpretation
Description: Focusing on Algernon Charles Swinburne's later writings, this collection makes a case for the seriousness and significance of the writer's mature work. While Swinburne's scandalous early poetry has received considerable critical attention, the thoughtful, rich, spiritually and politically informed poetry that began to emerge in his thirties has been generally neglected. This volume addresses the need for a fuller understanding of Swinburne's career that includes his fiction, aesthetic ideology, and analyses of Shakespeare and the great French writers. Among the key features of the collection is the contextualizing of Swinburne's work in new contexts such as Victorian mythography, continental aestheticism, positivism, and empiricism. Individual essays examine, among other topics, the dialect poems and Swinburne's position as a regional poet, Swinburne as a transition figure from nineteenth-century aesthetic writing to the professionalized criticism that dominates the twentieth century, Swinburne's participation in the French literary scene, Swinburne's friendships with women writers, and the selections made for anthologies from the nineteenth century to the present. Taken together, the essays offer scholars a richer portrait of Swinburne's importance as a poet, critic, and fiction writer. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Knowledge and sense experience in Swinburne's later poetry / Stephanie Kuduk Weiner; title: "Quivering web of living thought": conceptual networks in Swinburne's Songs of the springtides / John A. Walsh; title: Solar erotica: Swinburne's myth of creation / Yisrael Levin; title: Swinburne and the north / Brian Burton; title: Swinburne's Shakespeare: the verbal whirlwind? / Nick Freeman; title: A channel passage: Swinburne and France / Charlotte Ribeyrol; title: Swinburne's friendship with women writers / Catherine Maxwell; title: Selecting Swinburne / Rikky Rooksby.