Canonicity, Marginality, and the Celebration of the Minor

Abstract

Victorian poetry as a field tends to be among those subdisciplines least affected by theoretical and historical developments in literary study. In the eighties and early nineties, our field was certainly changed by demands to "open up" the canon. 1 Particularly with women poets, these investigations had an effect; any roster of poets from the nineteenth century now includes Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Michael Field —both in pedagogical anthologies like the Longman, Norton, and the Broadview, and in scholarly attention. At the same time, for all the talk about opening up the canon, the canon has shifted rather than expanded; certain authors on the edges (say, Patmore and the poets of the nineties) have been quietly or nearly dropped to include new objects of study. In addition, the scholarly canon has changed far less than it could have; scholars are not necessarily writing about newly rediscovered work as about works familiar to them. In the last decade and a half there was an explosion of articles on Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, which was hardly in danger of being ignored.