scholarly journals THE VICTORIAN VERSE NOVEL AS BESTSELLER: OWEN MEREDITH'SLUCILE

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-274
Author(s):  
Catherine Addison
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Significant Feature ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
High Literature ◽  
Verse Novel

By the 1860s, the versenovel had become a significant feature of the Victorian literary landscape. According to Dino Felluga, this hybrid was a “perverse” and even “subversive” genre, firstly, because it undermined the “‘high’ autotelic” status of poetry by mixing it with the “heteroglot, carnivalesque, and polyphonic novel” and, secondly, because its specific fictions tended to oppose or parody the “middle-class heterosexual, domestic ideology” upheld by the prose novel of the period. In support of his argument, Felluga discusses a handful of texts that are normally regarded as “high” literature: Elizabeth Barrett Browning'sAurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough'sAmours de Voyage, George Meredith'sModern Loveand Robert Browning'sThe Ring and the Book(Felluga, “Verse Novel” 171–74; “Novel Poetry” 491–96).

Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Collaboration ◽  
Economic Relationship

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.

‘Your Fourier’s Failed’

2018 ◽  
pp. 274-297
Author(s):  
Eric Hood
Keyword(s):  
Nodal Point ◽  
Psychological Needs ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
George Sand ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Charles Fourier ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Verse Novel

This chapter traces the affective forces at work in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s representation of utopian socialist Charles Fourier in Aurora Leigh (1855).  In Barrett Browning’s verse-novel, “Fourier” operates as a sign mediated by networks of affect, referring not only to the political struggles surrounding socialism in the 1850s but also to Barrett Browning’s personal psychoanalytic conflicts against both her father and her own queer desires (particularly, for George Sand).  Thus, “Fourier” functions as a nodal point in Aurora Leigh where a political crisis and the author’s individual psychological needs meet to produce a dismissal of the economic and social alternatives that were available at that historical moment and the forms of queer identity that challenged the heteronormative, liberal order.

Idolatrous Reading

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy L. Carens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Unhealthy Food ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
Patriarchal Culture

Timothy L. Carens, “Idolatrous Reading: Subversive Fantasy and Domestic Ideology” (pp. 238–266) In nineteenth-century Britain, patriarchal culture revealed its anxieties about female subjectivity and anxiety through an extensive debate about what young women should read. As critics have already shown, many writers in the period disparaged romantic novels by comparing them to unhealthy food, addictive drugs, or even illicit sexual encounters. The figure of idolatry played a significant role in this debate as well, suggesting that young female readers might betray the true god of the middle-class patriarchal order by worshiping more gratifying alternatives. If the language of idolatry generally connoted heretical transgression, emergent feminist writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon found that they could also use it to articulate a woman’s longing for the power to shape her own dreams. In Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864), a figure used to disparage women who neglect their role within the domestic order thus acquires a new and intensely ironic life as a way to imagine an escape from it.

Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture

1996 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 365
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Rose Gruner ◽  
Elizabeth Langland
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Domestic Ideology

Afterword

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Markovits
Keyword(s):  
Substantial Influence ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Golden Bowl ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
The Golden Bowl ◽  
Verse Novel ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Modernist Fiction

“Afterword: Adulterated Verse, the Modernist Remix,” reflects on the legacy of the Victorian verse-novel by addressing the genre’s substantial influence on modernist fiction. Circling back to the beginning, the Afterword considers Virginia Woolf’s response to Aurora Leigh in her essays and in The Waves (both 1831). It then returns to the topic of Chapter 1 by looking at how adultery enters a series of high modernist novels accompanied both by nods to some of the Victorian poems considered in the previous pages and by the same kinds of formal fracturing that are characteristic of the verse-novel genre. By locating traces of verse-novels in works such as Henry James’s The Golden Bowl and James Joyce’s Ulysses, the Afterword shows how, rather than a literary dead end, the Victorian verse-novel was a brave new beginning for generic experimentation.

E Pluribus Unum

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Markovits
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Verse Novel

Chapter 5, “E Pluribus Unum: The American Verse-Novel,” travels across the Atlantic to consider how and why verse-novels, imported and indigenous, garnered such remarkable American popularity, especially in the period of the Civil War and during Reconstruction. Beginning with a description of European verse-novels’ transatlantic journeys, fostered by what Meredith McGill has called an American “culture of reprinting,” the chapter then contemplates the native literary scene, which had borne many successful writers of long narrative verse, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Finally, it examines a trio of American verse-novels, all heavily indebted to Aurora Leigh, which exemplify, in variously negotiating that debt, how their poets used the form to navigate the cultural terrain: Josiah Holland’s Kathrina: Her Life and Mine, in a Poem (1867), Lucy Larcom’s An Idyl of Work (1875), and Epes Sargent’s The Woman Who Dared. For these writers, verse-novels promised peculiar purchase on their American publics.

Animal Bodies: Corporeality, Class, and Subject Formation in The Wide, Wide World

2000 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Mason
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Horseback Riding ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Middle Class Woman ◽  
Historical Contextualization

In recent criticism, arguments about whether domesticity in The Wide, Wide World (1850) empowered or disempowered women, and whether it was embraced or critiqued by Warner and her contemporaries, have been founded upon, or at least buttressed by, readings of horses and horsemanship. The interpretation of Ellen Montgomery's riding lessons as a metaphor for her disempowerment, and the ubiquitous denunciation of John Humphreys as "brutal horse-beater," however, have little grounding in the nineteenth-century horsemanship on which Warner drew. While for centuries horses in Western culture had been associated with human passions and horsemanship with their forcible domination, a combination of new methods for disciplining equines and new forms of recreational riding rendered the equine body, in the nineteenth century, discursively situated to communicate the internalized discipline and self-regulation that was necessary to make a human body middle class. Through horseback riding and other lessons, Ellen attains the particular mental and bodily development necessary for her to become a proper, sentimental, middle-class woman who is inserted into a network of power relations-a network in which Ellen attains power over other kinds of women who fail to meet the standards that she does. Historical contextualization also reveals that John's horsemanship accords quite well with nineteenth-century standards and would not have been seen as abusive by his contemporaries. As nearly all arguments about The Wide, Wide World's resistance to domestic ideology have been predicated upon John's propensity for horse-beating, this essay calls for a reexamination of what has become a principal claim of Warner criticism.

Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture

1997 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 957
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell ◽  
Elizabeth Langland
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Domestic Ideology

The Victorian Verse-Novel

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Markovits
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Substantial Influence ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Modernist Novel ◽  
Verse Novel ◽  
Idylls Of The King

This book considers the rise of a hybrid generic form, the verse-novel, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such poems combined epic length with novelistic plots in the attempt to capture not a heroic past but the quotidian present. Victorian verse-novels also tended to be rough-mixed, their narrative sections interspersed with shorter, lyrical verses in varied measures. In flouting the rules of contemporary genre theory, which saw poetry as the purview of the eternal and ideal and relegated the everyday to the domain of novelistic prose, verse-novels proved well suited to upsetting other hierarchies, as well, including those of gender and class. The genre’s radical energies often emerge from the competition between lyric and narrative drives, between the desire for transcendence and the quest to find meaning in what happens next; the unusual marriage plots that structure such poems prove crucibles of these rival forces. Generic tensions also yield complex attitudes toward time and space: the book’s first half considers the temporality of love, while its second looks at generic geography through the engagement of novels in verse with Europe and the form’s transatlantic travels. Both well-known verse-novels (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House) and lesser-known examples are read closely alongside a few nearly related works (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book). An Afterword traces the verse-novel’s substantial influence on the modernist novel.

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