Description
Book SynopsisThe Romance of the Lyric in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry: Experiments in Form offers a new account of the nature of the lyric as nineteenth-century women poets developed the form. It offers fresh assessments of the imaginative and aesthetic complexity of women’s poetry. The monograph seeks to redefine the range and cultural significance of women’s writing using the work of poets who have not, heretofore, been part of critical accounts of nineteenth-century lyric poetry. These new voices are set beside new readings of the poetry of established figures: for example, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Augusta Webster’s “Medea in Athens” and “Circe." The monograph draws substantially on the poetry of Rosamund Marriott Watson – who was lost to literary history before the restoration of her oeuvre through the scholarly and critical work of Professor Linda K. Hughes – to make the case that once neglected and lost voices provide new ways of determining the cultural centrality of women and the poetry they produced in one of the richest periods of poetic experimentation in the Western literary tradition. This monograph contends that Watson’s poetry and prose provide new ways of analyzing the complex and frequently transgressive nature of the lyric engagement of women with folklore and myth and with the growing understanding in the nineteenth century of the fragmented, fluid self in general and of the writer in particular.
Trade ReviewO'Brien's book is exemplary in approaching nineteenth-century ideas about poetic genre historically rather than imposing our own generic categories; and it breaks new ground in emphasizing the role of women writers in nineteenth century genre thinking. * SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *
This engaging and compelling book consists of juxtapositions and contexts that are fresh and inviting. . . .O'Brian's wide-ranging knowledge of poetic development and of the importance of folklore and myth, as well as her fruitful exploitation of intersections between poets and poems, highlight the consistent and deliberate refashioning of old forms of poetry by women in the nineteenth century. . . .The book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary scholarship and will be useful to academics and students with an interest in nineteenth-century poetry by women. * Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *
Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter One: Reading Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry in the Twenty-First Century Readers and Reading Domestic Space Performance and Parody The Parodic Performance of Romance Chapter Two: From Rags to Verses: Technology, Fugitive Poetry and the Domestic as Ephemera Creating the Ephemera of Home Fugitive Pieces The Poor Author’s, the Printer’s, and the Publisher’s Pudding Chapter Three: Lyric Space and Romance Forms Chapter Four: Uncanny Transactions and Canny Forms: Rosamund Marriott Watson’s Märchen Chapter Five: Parodic Myth: Unveiling Allegory and the Domestication of Myth in an Early Victorian Lyric Parodic Myth Mary Tighe’s Psyche and the Uses of Allegory “[A]ll confused and tangled with the flotsam and jetsam of earlier ages”: Mrs Bell and the Domestication of Myth Chapter Six: “And ho, so very still she stands”: Rosamund Marriott Watson’s Pygmalion and the Art of the House “Golden wings about my bed”: the Poetics of Domestic Space “You can make what you will of the house you live in”: Re-fashioning the Connoisseur The Genre of the Chamber “The White Lady”: Pygmalion in the Feminine, Niobe Recast Chapter Seven: Monsters and Doubles The Monster and the Body Politic The Were-Wolf and Jack the Ripper: the Monster and/as History in Rosamund Marriott Watson’s “A Ballad of the Were-Wolf” Romantic Displacements and Victorian Spaces: “Goblin Market” as Phantasmagoria Chapter Eight: “Witches’ Play” The Poetics of Extreme States The Metamorphic Lyric Voice in “Medea in Athens” “Should I be so your lover as I am?”: the Woman in the Mirror in “Circe” Changing the Status of the Supernatural: Folklore and Psychology “’Tis the lie for which she will burn”: A. Mary F. Robinson’s “The Wise-Woman” Centaurs and Roadsters: Double Consciousness and Unconscious Cerebration in Emily Pfeiffer’s “The Witch’s Last Ride” “I am she!”: Mary Coleridge’s “The Witch” and the Parodic Love Lyric Bibliography Index About the Author
