Abstract Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Sibylla Palmifera or Soul's Beauty (1866–1870) ‘double work of art’ is one of his most recognizable pictures and anthologized poems. His visual-verbal ‘double works’ – typically painting-sonnet composites that share a title, comment on each other, and elaborate on a joint subject – remain, however, understudied. Their cross-medium composition presents a challenge to segregated art-historical and literary scholarship. Almost all studies on these picture-word composites take a monodisciplinary approach and predominantly address a single component: the picture or the poem. Engagement with the other component is either cursory or non-existent. In (re)constructing the Sibylla ‘double works’, this essay argues for a renewed understanding of the viewer-reader and viewing-reading. The formation of the visual-verbal exchange at the heart of the ‘double work’ also results in problematic gaps, dissonances, and ruptures in visual-verbal representation. In a manner yet to be addressed in scholarship, this essay demonstrates how Rossetti exploits both alignment and divergence in the Sibylla ‘double work’ to inform and structure the viewer-reader’s encounter with the absence and presence generated by ideal beauty. By reassessing the wider relationship between (and experience of) picture and word, this essay situates the ‘double work’ form at the centre of image-text studies – and exposes the challenge that they present to disparate scholarship and methodologies.

Abstract This article reflects on the overlaps of English studies with studies of Political Rhetoric. It outlines current UK-based research agendas in ‘Rhetorical Political Analysis’. It proposes a shared agenda focused on speech and argument as social action, and informed by the idea of ‘Rhetorical Citizenship’, the right to participate fully in disputation.

Abstract The National Curriculum makes spoken poetry part of what children should know, but dramatically limits what it can do. Thinking of sound as a purely internal dimension of the poem, it ignores the way oral performance brings the context of the room, the person and the situation all into play with the meaning. Orality used to be much more important to English than it is now: Henry Newbolt put it at the centre of his 1921 English Report, arguing that sound and poetry are the primary medium in which children's loves might be formed. It is there for emotional aliveness, not cultural superiority, as Newbolt's critics have charged. But one of the missing contexts for Newbolt and for the curriculum itself is the twentieth-century change towards poets themselves reading. As Yeats, Pound, and Eliot met their audiences, they found that their poems were acquiring new meaning from the situations and places they were being read in. What we see with the oral turn is a space where aesthetic ‘form’, physical ‘context’, and social-cultural ‘occasion’ can briefly merge into one another, because the poem is being briefly inscribed, registered, or overlayed onto all of them. Oral delivery means the poem acquires some of the flavour of the place it is in – meaning that great care has to be taken to make classroom performance into real connection.

Abstract To be listening, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, is ‘is always to be on the edge of meaning’. How do we listen to a poem’s edge? To the end of the line? This essay thinks about line endings and how they invite our listening. It explores the acoustics, dynamics, and somatic experience of line endings in the works of a number of poets, including Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie, William Wordsworth, and Jen Hadfield. It draws on Nancy, Denise Levertov, and Rita Dove’s thinking about line endings, and offers a series of amplified close-listenings which open up wider thinking about how we read and experience poetry. This is part of a larger exploration of what it means to listen to a poem — to the sounds a poem remembers, to the sounds a poem makes — on the page, in the air, in the ear — but also to the spaces, to the gaps and pauses, to the white space at the end of a line.

Abstract I contend that in Keats’ poetry, sleep-states (rather than dreams) become a site of erotic intensity and power-play. Contemporary scientific literature such as Robert Gray’s The Theory of Dreams suggested that in sleep, ‘the senses, though capable of being aroused, are closed in insensibility’. I draw upon this thinking to show that through depictions of sleep, Keats creates a paradoxical, knowing eroticism where the senses are aroused even though the will is suspended. It is not that the continuum between dreaming and waking is eroticised, but that sleep becomes a highly controlled private space that is insistently open to sensory suggestion. By focusing on sleep as an embodied sensory experience, I show how in Keats’s work the uncoupling of agency and feeling creates an eroticism which tests the lines between surrender and consent, will and desire. Taking a new angle on what Byron considered to be a tendency towards euphemistic prurience in Keats’s writing, this essay also proposes that Keats’s interest in the erotic vulnerability of bodies to one another creates a negative capability, and an ethics, highly sensitised to the way the boundaries between self and world are maintained.

Abstract The narrative fictions of John Muckle reflect the increased motion and mobility of people and things in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This increase is a significant, although often invisible, part of the narrative and can be read through both the form and content of the writing. The working lives of his characters, and their sense of identity, are changed through acts of movement, while the objects that make up the environment they live in are similarly always in the process of change. Motion is not, however, the article claims, initiated or determined by social forces, or the inevitable consequence of a capitalist system that demands ever more productivity and growth. Motion is always and already there, and therefore is changed, but not initiated, by economic and social pressures. It is this interplay between people and things that are always and already moving, and a capitalism that seeks to change or direct that movement, that provides the tensions within the narrative and the events in the lives of the characters, both tragic and joyful. Narratives, and the movements they often describe, become less about beginnings and endings, and more about sequences of collisions and moments of change in direction and velocity.

There are two ways to fell a tree. One is, perhaps, instinctive, if not simply logical: measure and plan carefully, apply your saw, stand back, and watch it come down. If everything goes to plan, no one will remark on your work and the job will be quietly finished. The only trace of your presence in the process will be a stump and some useful lumber. The other (far less efficient) method is to strike it with lightning. In that case, you will need a species of luck borne from the mysteries of physics, as the negative and positive ions between the atmosphere and the tree engage in a complex negotiation until conditions are just right, and then, your tree will explode in a burst of sizzling light. If you are fortunate enough to catch it in the moment, there will be an incandescent blaze, too fast to register, but the result will be a charred and jagged remnant, and very little else of value. But you won’t forget the way that tree came down.