Valentine Cunningham - Victorian Poets: A Critical Reader

This edition first published 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Victorian Poets : a Critical Reader / edited by Valentine Cunningham.
pages cm. (Blackwell Critical Reader; 10)
Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-631-19913-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-631-19914-4 (paper) 1. English
poetry19th centuryHistory and criticism. I. Cunningham, Valentine, editor of
compilation.
PR593.V57 2014
.809dc23

2013038471

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Flora, details from tapestry weaving in wool and silk by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, with verses by Morris on borders, made by Morris & Company at Merton Abbey, 1885. Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester / Bridgeman Art Library.
Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates

Isobel Armstrong is Emeritus Professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Senior Research Fellow at the London University Institute of English Studies. An eminent scholar-critic especially of Victorian poetry, her publications include Arthur Hugh Clough (1962), The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations (1969), Victorian Scrutinies (1972), Robert Browning (1974), Language as Living form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (1982), Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Politics and Poetics (1993), Womens Poetry, Late Romantic to late Victorian: Gender and Genre (1999), The Radical Aesthetic (2000), Victorian Glassworlds (2008).
Joseph Bristow is a Professor of English at UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, with strong lines on gender and gay writing. His books include The Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona (1987), Robert Browning (1991), Empire Boys: Adventures in a Mans World (1991), Sexuality (1997), Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (1997), The Fin-de-Sicle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s (2005). His many editions include Victorian Women Poets: Emily Bront, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti (1995), Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (1996, with Isobel Armstrong), Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray (2004), Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions (2003), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (2000), and Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: the Making of a Legend (2008).
Timothy A J Burnett has retired from his job as a manuscript librarian in the Department of Western Manuscripts at the British Library, London. Writing as T A J Burnett, he is the author of The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy: The Life and Times of Scrope Berdmore Davies (1981), and the editor of Charlotte Bronts The Search after hapiness (sic): a Tale (1969), Childe Harolds Pilgrimage Canto III: a Facsimile of the Autograph Fair Copy found in the Scrope Davies Notebook (1988), and of The British Library Catalogue of the Ashley Manuscripts (1998) the collection of the notorious faker-bibliographer T J Wise.
Mary Wilson Carpenter is Professor Emerita of English, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She writes as a literary historian about Victorian literature with an emphasis on feminism and gender. Her main publications are George Eliot and the Landscape of Time: Narrative Form and Protestant Apocalyptic History (1986), Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality and Religion in the Victorian Market (2003) and Health, Medicine and Society in Victorian England (2010).
Mary Ann Caws is distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of City University, New York. An art historian, literary critic, and biographer of Proust, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Picasso and Salvador Dal, she has edited anthologies on Manifestoes, Surrealism, and twentieth-century French literature. Her many translations of modern French poets include Stphane Mallarm.
Carol T Christ became the tenth President of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts in 2002 after a distinguished career as Professor of English and administrator at the University of California, Berkeley. A strong champion of womens issues and diversity, her critical interests have focussed on Victorian women poets and novelists. As a Professor of English at Smith she teaches seminars on science and literature and on the arts. Her books include The Finer Optic: the Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry (1975), Victorian and Modern Poetics (1984), the Norton edition of George Eliots The Mill on the Floss (1994), and Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, edited with John O Jordan (1995).
Valentine Cunningham is a Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University and a Senior Research Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His books include Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (1975), British Writers of the Thirties (1988), In the Reading Gaol: Texts, Postmodernity and History