Amours de Voyage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Markovits
Keyword(s):  
Don Juan ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Spanish Gypsy ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Verse Novel ◽  
Structural Aspects

Chapter 4, “Amours de Voyage: The Verse-Novel and European Travel,” reflects on the expansive generic geography of the form. Like the influential ur-text Don Juan, almost all verse-novels exhibit what Clough calls amours de voyage. The chapter considers overlapping thematic and structural aspects of travel in a group of explicitly cosmopolitan verse-novels (Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Owen Meredith’s Lucile and Glenaveril, and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy): their use of the railway, of guidebooks, of epistolarity, and of plots involving hybrid heredity. The spatial energies of verse-novels often avoid not only the epic teloi of nation founding and empire building but also the novelistic telos of the courtship plot: marriage. These works travel in order to destabilize both their generic terrain and their ideological certainties. A postscript considers William Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, an exception to this travelling spirit that proves the rule.

‘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.

Energy transfer in non-covalent porphyrin assemblies: through-space or through-bond?

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 1069-1081 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Otsuki
Keyword(s):  
Energy Transfer ◽  
Antenna Arrays ◽  
Salt Bridges ◽  
Supramolecular Systems ◽  
Efficient Energy Transfer ◽  
Efficient Energy ◽  
Transfer Processes ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Photosynthetic Antenna ◽  
Structural Aspects

Photosynthetic antenna arrays found in nature funnel photoexcited energy into the reaction center. Attempts have been made to mimic the antenna function by using artificial chromophores, porphyrins in particular, not only to better understand the energy-transfer processes but also to create light-harvesting devices. This review covers non-covalent porphyrin assemblies, for which intra-ensemble energy-transfer processes were characterized. The essence of the mechanisms of energy transfer is summarized and specific examples are reviewed with an emphasis put on the rate and mechanism of singlet-singlet energy transfer. As these examples demonstrate, non-covalent intra-ensemble energy-transfer processes have been ascribed to the Förster-type through-space mechanism in almost all cases. The exception is porphyrin dyad and pentad from our group based on amidinium-carboxylate salt bridges. Through-bond superexchange mechanism is proposed to account for the fast excited energy-transfer processes for these unique assemblies. The importance of intermolecular interactions not only in terms of the structural aspects but also in terms of the electronic aspects is highlighted for the design of supramolecular systems in which efficient energy transfer is desired.

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.

The Longue Durée of Marriage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Markovits
Keyword(s):  
Don Juan ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
Earthly Paradise ◽  
Verse Novel

Chapter 2, “The Longue Durée of Marriage,” offers a formal explanation to the centrality of conjugal experience in the Victorian verse-novel, despite marriage’s representational challenge (as outlined by Kierkegaard in Either/Or). In Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House, the extended middle responsible for the poem’s length develops out of this difficulty. By using durational narrative to expand lyric forms of love poetry, Patmore had hoped to portray marriage’s duration without sacrificing the intensity of romantic ardor. But, as comparisons to Byron’s Don Juan suggest, the resultant compound proves unstable. This chapter uncovers the unsettling results of such extension by showing how the need for length introduces ideas of seriality, including the notion of a sequel to love in the afterlife through (potentially adulterous) marriage in heaven. A coda considers William Morris’s The Lovers of Gudrun, the longest and most novelistic tale from his immense Earthly Paradise.

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.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Markovits
Keyword(s):  
Genre Theory ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Short History ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Long Form ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
Verse Novel

“Introduction: A Short History of a Long Form” introduces the verse-novel by describing its major features—including its contemporaneity (in contrast to epic), its storytelling impulse, its frequent use of interpolated lyric verses (“rough-mixing”), and its preference for common language—against the backdrop of Victorian genre theory and recent accounts of the period’s poetic genres. Focusing on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, an early and influential example of the form, the Introduction suggests how Victorian writers self-consciously used the generic indeterminacy of the verse-novel to contest social as well as literary norms and express a broad range of cultural concerns. It also traces some of the prior hybrid experiments that influenced the rise of the verse-novel at mid-century and offers a preview of the chapters to come.

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).

Antislavery Afterlives: Changing the Subject / Haunting the Poetess

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tricia Lootens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Spanish Gypsy

This chapter examines mid- to late-Victorian attempts at self-distancing from triumphalist (and literalist) early antislavery promises, focusing in particular on how the themes of haunting, displacement, and denial threaded through many later Victorians' patriotic invocations of liberating empire. Drawing on emerging pedagogical and scholarly revolutions in studies of nineteenth-century British relations to slavery, the chapter considers histories of disciplinary reticence dating back in part to the Victorians themselves. It also discusses the increasingly iconic histories of the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention and J.M.W. Turner's painting Slave Ship as well as Elizabeth V. Spelman's Fruits of Sorrow and her notion of “changing the subject.” Finally, it explores the discipline termed “ethical refocalization” by turning to three parallel scenes of interrupted Poetess performance, in Germaine de Staël's Corinne, or Italy; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and George Eliot's Spanish Gypsy.

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