Full Description
Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life casts new light on nineteenth-century poetry by examining the period through its popular verse forms and their surrounding social and media landscape. The volume offers insight into two central concepts of both the Victorian era and our own—status and taste—and how cultural hierarchies then and now were and are constructed and broken. By recovering the lost diversity of Victorian verse, the book maps the breadth of Victorian writing and reading practices, illustrating how these seemingly minor verse genres actually possessed crucial social functions for Victorians, particularly in education, leisure practices, the cultural production of class, and the formation of individual and communal identities. The essays consider how "major" Victorian poets, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, were also committed to writing and reading "minor" verse, further troubling the clear-cut notions of canonicity by examining the contradictions of value.
Contents
Introduction.- Chapter One: Workplace Verse: Poetry, Performance and the Industrial Worker.- Chapter Two: Sonnet Contests and Poetic Parlor Games.- Chapter Three: Christina Rossetti's Verses.- Chapter Four: Anti-Elitist Elitist Verse Forms: Comic Ballades and Rondeaus in Punch and Fun.- Chapter Five: "Of china that's ancient and blue": Andrew Lang and the Idea of Form".- Chapter Six: Victorian Verse on the Colonial Frontier: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and the Versification of Settler Colonial Culture in Australia.- Chapter Seven: William Barnes's Dual Vocation and the Management of Feeling.- Chapter Eight: Decisions and Revisions and Revolutions: History as Verse in Thomas Carlyle.- Chapter Nine: Commemorating the 1834 Parliament Fire in Satirical and Somber Verse.- Chapter Ten: Rossetti in the Nursery: The Speaking Silences of Sing-Song.- Chapter Eleven: Playing Along: The Verse in Victorian Poetry.
