The Lyric in Victorian Memory

Beschreibung

This book is a study of nineteenth-century poems that remember, yearn for, fixate on, and forget the past. Reflecting the current critical drive to reconcile formalist and historicist approaches to literature, it uses close readings to trace the complex interactions between memory as a theme and the (often-memorable) formal traits – such as brevity, stanzaic structure, and sonic repetition – that appear in the lyrics examined. This book considers the interwoven nature of remembering and forgetting in the work of four Victorian poets.  It uses this theme to shed new light on the relationship between lyric and narrative, on the connections between gender and genre, and on the way in which Victorians represented and commemorated the past.

It helps to fulfil a still-extant critical need as it presents a sustained and wide-ranging discussion of Victorian lyric, examining the authorial anxieties and aspirations such poetry reveals, rather than privileging dramatic or narrative modes It features a series of close readings that view the theme of recollection through the lens of form in both well-known and more obscure poems; these readings are then connected to Victorian conceptions of memory, loss, and nostalgia more generally conceived. In this way it builds on the influential notion of a nineteenth-century crisis of memory by investigating, more than any other study, the inevitable simultaneity of remembering and forgetting in Victorian verse. Finally, it expands the theme of memory to encompass technologies of reproduction and circulation, such as photographs, Claude glasses, and anthologies It ties its main arguments about memory to formal memorizability, reception history, and Victorian poets’ complex anticipations of (and resistances to) the ways in which they would be remembered and read. This provides a blueprint for future research Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autor*in

Veronica Alfano

Themen in »The Lyric in Victorian Memory«

Poetry Nineteenth Century British Literature Rossetti British and Irish Literature

Stimmen zu »The Lyric in Victorian Memory«

“Veronica Alfano’s beautifully written study offers a fresh take on an ancient topic, the mnemonic function of poetry.  In showing how poems succeed in (but also resist) remembering and being remembered, Alfano persuasively demonstrates the centrality of poetry to Victorian concepts of memory while also shedding new light on the nature of lyric itself.” (Erik Gray, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA)

“This is an erudite, sensitive study of Victorian lyrics about memory, loss, and time. Alfano uncovers a fascinating tradition of poetry that explores the inextricability of remembering and forgetting, of personal history and cultural nostalgia.” (Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Professor of English, Wesleyan University, USA)

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