Description
Book SynopsisAcross the nineteenth century, meter mattered—in more ways and to more people than we might well appreciate today. For the period’s poets, metrical matters were a source of inspiration and often vehement debate. And the many readers, teachers, and pupils encountered meter and related topics in both institutional and popular forms.
Trade Review“Hall’s edited collection is…alive to the latest scholarship, and full of excitingly experimental research.” * Cambridge Quarterly *
“This outstanding collection traces the heated debates over the meaning and practice of metrical forms in 19th-century England (and to a lesser extent in the US).... The essays are uniformly excellent.... The book requires too much expertise for undergraduates, but will be required reading for poetry specialists.
Summing Up: Highly recommended.” * Choice *
“These ambitious and richly varied essays bring a new and vital energy to Victorian poetry studies and literary study more generally. Arguing, on the one hand, for a thoroughly historicized poetics and, on the other, for fresh theoretical attention to prosodic effects, the volume makes a convincing case: meter does indeed matter.”
Table of ContentsTable of Contents * List of Illustrations * Preface * Acknowledgments * Introduction A Great Multiplication of Meters Jason David Hall * One: Meter and Meaning Isobel Armstrong * Two: Romantic Measures Stressing the Sound of Sound Susan J. Wolfson * Three: Byron's Feet Matthew Bevis * Four: "Break, Break, Break" into Song Yopie Prins * Five: Material Patmore Jason R. Rudy * Six: "For the Inscape 's Sake" Sounding the Self in the Meters of Gerard Manley Hopkins Summer J. Star * Seven: "But the Law Must Itself Be Poetic" Swinburne, Omond, and the New Prosody Yisrael Levin * Eight: Popular Ballads Rhythmic Remediations in the Nineteenth Century Michael Cohen * Nine: Blank Verse and the Expansion of England The Meter of Tennyson's Demeter cornelia Pearsall * Ten: Prosody Wars Meredith Martin * Select Bibliography * Notes on * Contributors * Index
