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.

Adulterated Verse

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Markovits
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Golden Bowl ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
The Golden Bowl ◽  
Verse Novel

Chapter 1, “Adulterated Verse,” considers Violet Fane’s Denzil Place: A Story in Verse, one of many poems to build upon the success of Aurora Leigh. Fane’s comparatively late example of a verse-novel synthesizes many of the genre’s most remarkable features. Its hybrid energies appear in the sympathetic narrative of a surprisingly happy fall into adultery. The adultery plot is exemplary for the form; this chapter explores why by showing how adultery’s cultural dynamics offer parallels to the literary dynamics of verse-novels. Fane self-consciously uses intertextuality (especially with Milton’s Paradise Lost) and scenes of reading (as in allusions to Dante’s Paolo and Francesca) to explore the ramifications of generic hybridity, above all as they concern the interplay between lyric and narrative temporalities in love. The chapter also compares the verse-novel’s effects to those of novels, such as James’s The Golden Bowl.

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.

Herakles at the Ends of the Earth

1981 ◽  
Vol 101 ◽  
pp. 141-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gloria Ferrari Pinney ◽  
Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
Small Series ◽  
Golden Bowl ◽  
The Golden Bowl ◽  
The Waves ◽  
As If

Representations of Helios in his chariot rising above the sea begin toward the end of the sixth century B.C., with a small series of black-figure vases, mostly lekythoi. Five of them have been interpreted as illustrations of the myth of Herakles and the Golden Bowl of the Sun. In Pherekydes' version of the story, Herakles, vexed by the burning rays, threatened Helios with his arrows, and obtained the god's golden vessel to sail the Ocean to the land of Geryon. Although the correspondence of the picture to the story is not literal, in fact largely limited to the cast of characters, such an interpretation is plausible for four vases.On the lekythos in Athens by the Daybreak Painter, Herakles is crouching on a spur of ground which seems to emerge from the waves; he looks at the Sun in apparent awe. The scenes on the skyphos by the Theseus Painter in Taranto are akin to the Athenian piece: on one side Herakles rushes up the steep ground, on the other he sits on the rocky outline, his right hand gesturing toward the Sun. On a third vase, a lekythos in Cambridge, and on a fourth in Oxford, both Herakles and Athena are depicted on either side of Helios; on the Cambridge lekythos Herakles is actually striding toward the Sun, lifting the bow in his right hand. Only in this case can Herakles' attitude be taken as a threat; on all four vessels, however, the hero and the Sun look at each other, as if an exchange were to take place soon, and so are shown as the actors of the scene.

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