Guide to the Year's Work: General Materials

Abstract

Certainly one of largest, and probably most important, recent works on Victorian is A Companion to Victorian edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison, a compilation of thirty-one substantial essays by established scholars on a wide variety of forms and issues. The Companion is an embarrassment of riches for a reviewer since many of essays call out for extended individual attention, but I will focus my attention here on structure and achievement of volume as a whole. Considering both difficulties of articulating a fixed canon of Victorian poets and limitations of looking at poets in isolation, editors have chosen wisely to eschew usual practice of commissioning essays on individual poets, and have instead commissioned essays on wide ranging but more or less discrete topics: genres (from epic to nonsense), traditions (classical and medieval), schools (Tractarian, Spasmodic, and Pre-Raphaelite), market for poetry, and intersections of with elements of Victorian culture (imperialism, nationalisms, religion, science, gender, and sexuality). Obviously parceling out essays to a variety of scholars might lead to artificial boundaries among diverse but connected topics, but editors have trusted various authors to negotiate debatable borders of their topics, with result essays fruitfully overlap, providing coherence and continuity without redundancy. Conspicuously missing from list of topics are poetry by women, Queer Poetry, and and Ideology, but, again, editors have wisely chosen to leave treatment of such concerns to emerge from manner of treatment of topics. As editors point out, absence of a chapter on women poets suggests that work of women poets no longer needs special defence (p. ix). As a result of editorial procedures and consistently high level of authorial contributions, Companion provides myriad critical perspectives and contextualizations of a very wide range of poets and poems, and constitutes an invaluable resource for students of period. Without making invidious distinctions or odious comparisons, and without providing analysis and commentary various chapters deserve, it seems fair to point out some of highlights of volume. Herbert Tucker's discussion of epic calls attention not only to usual suspects, but also to a surprising number of fascinating, though justly neglected, contenders, and Matthew Rowlinson, in his chapter on lyric, offers a compelling argument about how the genre of lyric is in Victorian for first time fully implicated in production of print text as a commodity (p. 60). The volume also contains authoritative yet suggestive essays on Tractarian by Stephen Prickett, on Spasmodic by Cronin, on poetic marketplace by Lee Erickson, on and religion by W. David Shaw, and on and science by Alan Rauch. Surprisingly, Companion rewards careful reading from cover to cover, though it will surely be more valued as a reference text for bringing readers up to date on current thinking about particular topics. A somewhat more specialized topic, not undertaken by Companion, is explored in Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry by Emily Haddad, who offers an ambitiously revisionist view of literary history of nineteenth century as she attempts to show orientalism's centrality to evolution of and poetics in France and Britain (p. 2). More specifically, Haddad argues nineteenth-century aestheticism constitutes Islamic Orient in particular as a fundamentally site (p. 3), an other to European conceptions of nature as object of mimetic representation. Examining both French and English of Romantic and Victorian periods, Haddad traces an engagement with Islamic orient from romanticism of Southey, Shelley, Byron, Hemans, and even Wordsworth in England and Hugo and Musset in France through an increasing emphasis on it as a source and object of aesthetic experimentation with amimetic poetics in Theophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Alfred Tennyson, and, more dubiously, Matthew Arnold, and finally to a culmination of orientalist poetics as aestheticism or art for art's sake in Oscar Wilde's theory and practice. …