Description
Book SynopsisVictorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life casts new light on nineteenth-century poetry by examining the period through its popular verse forms and their surrounding social and media landscape. The volume offers insight into two central concepts of both the Victorian era and our own—status and taste—and how cultural hierarchies then and now were and are constructed and broken. By recovering the lost diversity of Victorian verse, the book maps the breadth of Victorian writing and reading practices, illustrating how these seemingly minor verse genres actually possessed crucial social functions for Victorians, particularly in education, leisure practices, the cultural production of class, and the formation of individual and communal identities. The essays consider how “major” Victorian poets, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, were also committed to writing and reading “minor” verse, further troubling the clear-cut notions of canonicity by examining the contradictions of value.
Table of Contents1 Introduction: Defining Victorian Verse 2 The Matter with Verse: What Victorian Poetry Wasn’t, and Was 3 Filler Poems: Synecdoche and the Serial Rhythms of Victorian Poetry 4 Workplace Verse: Poetry, Performance and the Industrial Worker 5 Contingent Lyrics: Christina Rossetti’s Verses and Poems 6 Exile and Elegy: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and Colonial Verse
7 William Barnes’s Dual Vocation and the Management of Feeling 8 “Of China That’s Ancient and Blue”: Andrew Lang, English Parnassus, and the Figure of Form 9 Anti-Elitist Elitist Verse: Comic Ballades, Rondeaus &c. in Punch and Fun 10 “Visions, half-visions, guesses and darknesses…”: History as Verse in Thomas Carlyle 11 Silence, Rhyme, and Motherhood in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song 12 Nineteenth-Century Sonnet Contests and Parlor Games: “Leafiness” and Bits of Rhyme 13 “Hymns That Have Helped”: Hymnody as Lived Verse for the Victorian Public
