Revisiting the Brownings’ Poetry in the Pages of Neo-Victorian Novels and their Russian Translations

Abstract

The neo-Victorian novels of our time (by A.S. Byatt, Maggie Power, Laura Fish, et.al) reverberate with echoes from English poetry of the 19th century, and not in the least, from famous dramatic monologues (the genre, which came into existence thanks to Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson). According to the present-day scholarship, the term "dramatic monologue" denotes the versified speech of a character, who suffers from a mental disorder and tries to combine the frankness of confession with the art of argument and seduction. This monologue is usually addressed to another character – a silent interlocutor, in front of whom the speaker, in a burst of eloquence, reveals the unsightly sides of his perverted doings or his character. In Victorian England, dramatic monologues featured the same marginal characters, which figured in sensation fiction. The article dwells on the ways dramatic monologues are employed in “Possession” (1990) by A.S. Byatt and “Strange Music” (2008) by Laura Fish. The writers not only include extensive quotes from R. Browning and E. Barret-Browning, but also create their own variations of dramatic monologues in verse and prose. Of particular interest are Victorian and neo-Victorian artistic approaches to the criteria of ‘normality’, to the rhetoric of justification, to the methods of argumentation.