Browning's Trumpeter


Book Description




The Quest for Shakespeare


Book Description

This book traces the formation and impact of the New Shakspere Society, created in 1873, which dedicated itself to solving the mysteries of Shakespeare’s authorship by way of science. This promise, however, was undermined not only by the antics of its director, Frederick J. Furnivall, but also by the inexactitudes of the tests. Jeffrey Kahan puzzles out how a society geared towards science quickly devolved into a series of grudge matches. Nonetheless, the New Shakspere Society set the bibliographical and biographical agenda for the next century—an unusual legacy for an organization that was rife with intrigue, enmity, and incompetence; lives were ruined, lawyers consulted, and scholarship (mostly bad) produced and published.




Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy


Book Description

Taking an original approach to Robert Browning's poetics, Britta Martens focuses on a corpus of relatively neglected poems in Browning's own voice in which he reflects on his poetry, his self-conceptualization and his place in the poetic tradition. She analyzes his work in relation to Romanticism, Victorian reactions to the Romantic legacy, and wider nineteenth-century changes in poetic taste, to argue that in these poems, as in his more frequently studied dramatic monologues, Browning deploys varied dramatic methods of self-representation, often critically and ironically exposing the biases and limitations of the seemingly authoritative speaker 'Browning'. The poems thus become devices for Browning's detached evaluation of his own and of others' poetics, an evaluation never fully explicit but presented with elusive economy for the astute reader to interpret. The confrontation between the personal authorial voice and the dramatic voice in these poems provides revealing insights into the poet's highly self-conscious, conflicted and sustained engagement with the Romantic tradition and the diversely challenging reader expectations that he faces in a post-Romantic age. As the Victorian most rigorous in his rejection of Romantic self-expression, Browning is a key transitional figure between the sharply antagonistic periods of Romanticism and Modernism. He is also, as Martens persuasively demonstrates, a poet of complex contradictions and an illuminating case study for addressing the perennial issues of voice, authorial authority and self-reference.







Robert Browning


Book Description

Robert Browning (1812-89) rivals Tennyson as the major Victorian poet with such important works as Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, Men and Women, Dramatic Personae and the monumental The Ring and the Book. He is known for his development of the dramatic monologue in which he recreated the world of Renaissance Italy, and provided subtle and complex explorations of character. Here, Daniel Karlin and John Woolford provide a thematic survey of Browning's often difficult work, using key poems as a common point of reference. The themes covered include: styles, genres, the mind, the world, interaction and criticism. This excellent survey will be of value to students of Victorian literature and modernism.




The Poems of Browning: Volume Three


Book Description

The Poems of Browning is a multi-volume edition of the poetry of Robert Browning (1812 -1889) resulting from a completely fresh appraisal of the canon, text and context of his work. The poems are presented in the order of their composition and in the text in which they were first published, giving a unique insight into the origins and development of Browning's art. Annotations and headnotes, in keeping with the traditions of Longman Annotated English Poets, are full and informative and provide details of composition, publication, sources and contemporary reception. Volumes one (1826-1840) and two (1841-1846) presented the poems from his early years up to his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett, including the dramatic poem Paracelsus (1835), which first brought him to wide attention, and Sordello (1840), which confirmed him as a poet of ambition and imagination. Volume three (1847-1861) of The Poems of Browning covers the years of Browning's life in Italy with his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During the fifteen years of his marriage and self-imposed exile, Browning produced Christmas-Eve and Easter Day (1850), a major statement of his religious philosophy, and Men and Women (1855), his greatest collection of shorter poems. The poems of Men and Women, like all Browning's work, are steeped in his wide and idiosyncratic knowledge of literature, music, art, history, and popular culture, but a new and distinctive touch comes from the sights, sounds and textures of ordinary life in Italy. Based on a comprehensive study of textual and contextual sources, including a significant amount of hitherto undiscovered or unpublished manuscripts of poems and letters, this volume offers the most complete and informative edition of works that are central to Browning's achievement. In addition, Browning's most important work of critical prose, the Essay on Shelley, is presented in an appendix with full annotation, and poems which refer to specific works of painting or sculpture are illustrated with colour plates. Volumes four presents the poetry Browning produced during the decade following the death of his wife, including Dramatis Personae, which heralded a re-evaluation of his critical reputation, and The Ring and the Book, which many consider to be his greatest work. The Poems of Browning represents the most informative and up-to-date edition of the works of one of England's greatest poets.




The Poems of Browning: Volume One


Book Description

The Poems of Browning is the first collected edition to be based on the earliest printed texts, and to present these texts in order of their composition.Together, volumes I and II provide an authoritative and accessible tribute to this great poet. Volume I, 1826-1840 traces Browning's career up to the writing of Sordello. It includes his only surviving juvenilia: The Dance of Death and The First-Borm of Egypt; Pauline, his first anonymous publication, and Paracelsus, the poem which made his literary reputation.




Robert Browning


Book Description

Browning both denied and affirmed the value of biography for an understanding of literature. This book narrates the development of his controversial creative life through responses to his work by five key nineteenth-century figures: John Stuart Mill, William Charles Macready, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. It also relates Browning's sense of literary vocation to Victorian publishing. Browning emerges as a writer vividly engaged with contemporary assumptions, yet deeply aware of the unaccountability of writing.




A Browning Chronology


Book Description

Several thousand letters to and from Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning have survived, together with other information on the composition and context of works from Barrett's 'lines on virtue' written at the age of eight in 1814 to Browning's Asolando (1889). The Chronology seeks to guide readers through this mass of material in three main sections: youth, contrasting early backgrounds and careers, and growing interest in each other's work to 1845; courtship, marriage, Italy, and work including Aurora Leigh and Men and Women (1845-61); Browning's later life of relentless socializing and prolific writing from his return to London to his death in Venice in 1889. The book provides not only precise dating but much matter on such topics as the Brownings' extensive reading in English, French and classical literature, their many friendships, and their sometimes conflicting political beliefs.




Between Generations


Book Description

Winner of the Children’s Literature Association’s 2019 Book Award Between Generations is a multidisciplinary volume that reframes children as powerful forces in the production of their own literature and culture by uncovering a tradition of creative, collaborative partnerships between adults and children in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. The intergenerational collaborations documented here provide the foundations for some of the most popular Victorian literature for children, from Margaret Gatty's Aunt Judy's Tales to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Examining the publication histories of both canonical and lesser-known Golden Age texts reveals that children collaborated with adult authors as active listeners, coauthors, critics, illustrators, and even small-scale publishers. These literary collaborations were part of a growing interest in child agency evident in cultural, social, and scientific discourses of the time. Between Generations puts these creative partnerships in conversation with collaborations in other fields, including child study, educational policy, library history, and toy culture. Taken together, these collaborations illuminate how Victorians used new critical approaches to childhood to theorize young people as viable social actors. Smith's work not only recognizes Victorian children as literary collaborators but also interrogates how those creative partnerships reflect and influence adult-child relationships in the world beyond books. Between Generations breaks the critical impasse that understands children's literature and children themselves as products of adult desire and revises common constructions of childhood that frequently and often errantly resign the young to passivity or powerlessness.