Productive Convergences, Producing Converts

Abstract

Once, a well-respected professor of English, when told that I was doing some work on Robert Browning, replied, I've always found Browning just so hokey, in that Victorian way. Unfortunately, in recent decades such dismissive attitudes toward Victorian poetry have been quite common among literary scholars (even if honesty to admit them so openly has not), and many students of literature have had so little contact with Victorian poetry that they can muster no opinion at all. Scholars of Victorian poetry are now, however, in an excellent position to counter this dismissal and neglect. We are witnessing beginnings of a new trend in literary criticism, one that respects both formal structures and social contexts of poems. Perhaps in coming years, we will also see a blend of poetic theory with narratology. Both trends would be especially well-suited to highlight strengths of Victorian poetry and to earn attention of students and scholars. Until very recently, literary critics had been living with legacy of major critical movements which explicitly advocated a division between form and content, valuing one and decrying other. We are, by now, quite familiar with accounts of New Criticism's espousal of detailed formal analysis to exclusion of all contextual considerations, of Deconstruction's attempts to demystify both poets' and New Critics' failed attempts to achieve unity and stable signification, and of New Historicism's exposure of social contexts and ideologies that had been occluded by poetic forms and formalist approaches. The critical gap between formal structures and social concerns was partly bridged by movements intent on reclaiming writings of women, working classes, and colonial and post-colonial subjects. By bringing marginalized writers into canon, practitioners of gender/genre criticism, for instance, refocused attention on how women writers contested and reevaluated male canonical forms. This process of reclaiming alternate literary traditions, and their alternate poetic forms, is an important project that continues today, often within pages of this journal, as in Bonnie Robinson's introduction to a special issue on women writers of 1890-1918. She draws our attention to possibility that conservative poetics of late-Victorian and early-Modernist women writers may belie their radical politics, offering an inversion of radical poetics and conservative politics of their male Modernist counterparts. (1) Of course, relation between poetic forms and political beliefs need not be an exclusively hostile one, and canonical poets are also capable of contesting previous poetic forms and imbuing their poetic experiments with a political valence. An expansion of critical approaches that recognize and respect interdependence of poetic forms and social contexts was needed. Such an expansion of critical perspective, and a key moment in revitalizing study of Victorian poetry, occurred with publication of Isobel Armstrong's Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. Armstrong recognizes that the Victorian period has always been regarded as isolated between two periods, Romanticism and modernism.... It is either on way from Romantic poetry, or on way to modernism. It is situated between two kinds of excitement, in which it appears not to participate. (2) She counters this relegation by reasserting continuities across three periods, seeing Victorian poetic forms not as derivative but rather as intensified and self-aware. Thus, Victorians exhibited similar anxieties as Romantics, but in a more acute form, and Victorians share self-reflexivity of Modernists without abandoning attempt to create content within their reflexive forms (pp. 6-7). I agree that such a reevaluation of place of Victorians in literary history is crucial. But it is not enough for Victorianists to assert importance of period from within field of Victorian poetry. …