Nineteenth-century Poetry Research Articles

From Augustus’s Soup to Augustus Gloop: The Persistence of Punishing ‘Bad Eaters’ in Nineteenth-century Children’s Literature and Beyond

While previous accounts of the function of food in children’s literature have mainly focused on fiction, this article examines nineteenth-century poetry and drama where ‘bad eating’ is constructed as a form of anti-social behaviour that children should be warned against and should learn to despise in others as well as themselves. Poetry for children, throughout the century, is designed to be repeated orally, often learned by heart and thus internalised: its emblematic characters, secured in memory by rhyme and metre, therefore have particular staying power in childhood consciousness that makes the trope of the ‘bad eater’ especially durable. Theatrical representations, likewise, serve to set the image of the unruly child eater within comic traditions that offer his or her body as an absurd spectacle at which the audience can confidently scoff. These tropes and images have a literary longevity that both reflects and sustains aspects of blame around ‘anti-social’ eating, which children internalise from a young age.

Cohesion and Coherence for Poetry Interpretation and Translation

The act of interpreting and translating poetry has always been a daunting task, given its condensed diction that has multiple layers of meaning. In poetry, cohesive ties, commonly used to stick linguistic units together, help convey the deep underlying sense, and the network of conceptual relations is so well interwoven, given the limited space that necessitates the use of condensed diction that affords multiple interpretations. This intricacy has led many a theorist to proclaim the untranslatability of poetry. The present study aims to find a reliable method for both interpreting the deep underlying sense of a poem and assessing the quality of its translation. Such a study is highly significant as it would help interpreters of poetry verify their subjective interpretation and provide translators with a reliable test to assess The quality of their translation. The research questions the researcher attempted to answer are: How could the deep underlying sense of a poem be verified? How would the quality of its translation be reliably assessed? To answer these questions, the researcher hypothesized that De Beaugrande’s and Dressler’s (1981) textual analysis of cohesion and coherence could provide such a reliable method. To test the hypothesis, three English poems were selected from Nineteenth Century Poetry Inspired by Ancient Egypt, edited by Donald P. Ryan (2007) and their Arabic translation by Mohamed ‘Ananī (2015). First, the cohesion and coherence of both source and target poems were analyzed to discover the deep underlying sense. Then, cohesion and coherence between source and target poems were assessed. The results of textual analysis have shown that cohesion and coherence could be used as a reliable method not only to unravel the deep underlying sense of poetry but also to assess the effectiveness of the translation in conveying it.

Barbara Pym’s Last Title

A STORY IS TOLD by Hazel Holt, junior colleague of Barbara Pym at the International African Institute, then close friend for life, then editor and biographer (while herself a good novelist). She records how late she was in coming to read her future colleague’s first published novel, Some Tame Gazelle. She had assumed that it was some repulsive account of big-game hunting in Africa. When she at last opened it, she was entranced.1 I like this story because my own experience was so similar. Clearly, Pym’s titles may sometimes be rather special. It would be safe to suppose that this wasn’t from mere whim or incapacity. Pym was a born writer, who would probably have liked to be a poet, as the more glamorous calling. But her gifts were for that real human world of small things that gave the novel its character, as far back as Defoe. Richly accurate as she could be, she yet worked through the excellent and unpretentious medium of ‘entertainment literature’ or romance, as a good number of the best literary artists in Britain before her had done. But loving poetry as she did, she would take a title from nineteenth century verse (Some Tame Gazelle) or seventeenth (A Glass of Blessings) even when she had to adapt it (No Fond Return of Love). These articulate memories of a classic past bring a certain half-ironic authority to the often extremely funny if touching romances that follow the titles, an effect of course increased by the frequent counterpoint of verse quotations inside the story.

The Waste Land: Eliot’s Neo-Empire

Thomas Stearns Eliot's The Waste Land is a mysterious enigmatic text in both its form and content which still invites many critics and reviewers to an infinite range of interpretations finding in it a striking departure from nineteenth century poetry and raising the flag of modernism and postmodernism. Its appearance in 1922 started a critical debate among critics who found it hard to place both because of the poet's complex artistic strategies and because of the poem's kaleidoscopic orchestrated structure. From this perspective, the present paper is mainly concerned with the poem’s kaleidoscopic structure highlighting the text's intertextuality, heterogeneity and multiculturalism. It seeks to re-read and investigate the poem from the perspective of Edward Said's Postcolonial theory proving that the poem’s encyclopedic structure achieves for the poet a form of Neo-Colonialism where the poet’s intellectual domination replaces the territorial one. The study concludes by showing that The Waste Land is an early example of postmodernism where the text becomes the poet’s Neo-empire.

Introduction: Poetry and the Victorian Visual Imagination

Introduction:Poetry and the Victorian Visual Imagination Jill R. Ehnenn (bio) and Heather Bozant Witcher (bio) What might it mean to "see" poetry of the nineteenth century? Certainly, it might mean an act of generic visibility: reorienting conceptions of the Victorian age as equivalent to the rise of the novel to reconsider the centrality of poetry (an act of scholarly recovery that has been in process for at least the past decade). It might also gesture toward the visual possibilities of poetic language—the transportive effects of the imagination—and the interrelation of media, sensory modes (words, ideas, tastes, sounds, sights, spectacles), and the embodied experience that Victorian poetry is uniquely primed to explore. And, of course, it also conjures up the optical technologies that allowed for mechanical "seeing"—photographic and engraved images, the magic lantern, kaleidoscope, stereoscope, and others—alongside the so-called Golden Age of illustration, a moment in which literature—and particularly poetry and periodicals—is richly illustrated to join word and image. What might such thinking about the visual vis-à-vis Victorian poetry bring to the discipline of Victorian studies—indeed, English studies in general—especially now? Since the 1990s, the field of Victorian studies has emphasized the impact of visual culture on historical and literary contexts. As Kate Flint asserts in her The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000), the visual is a dominant mode of the Victorian period. Jonathan Crary questioned subjectivity by foregrounding the role of the nineteenth-century observer in his Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990). By tracing optical devices as "sites of both knowledge and power that operate directly on the body of the individual," Crary used optical experience and visual culture to reconsider what we mean by realism in the nineteenth century.1 Jonathan Potter furthers Crary's argument, showcasing the continual negotiation of Victorian subjectivities by focusing on the mediation of perceptual experience in his Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2018). Yet, these conversations about individual subjectivities and the intersections between the visual and verbal environs have largely explored genres other than poetry. This special issue, therefore, centers on the affordances of poetry as a [End Page 429] site of visual imagination. How might looking at the intersections of the Victorian visual imagination and the field of nineteenth-century poetry provide new insights into continued conversations surrounding both poetics and visual culture? What, then, might it mean to "look" differently at Victorian poetry? In the essays that follow, the contributors offer unique methodologies, case studies, and discussions about how new ways of looking provoke affective representations of others and one's own identity. But perhaps more broadly, these new considerations of poetry and the visual imagination offer disruptions to the so-called natural or normal order. When thinking specifically of the possibilities of Victorian poetry, Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow both point to the genre's experimental and social nature.2 This experimentalism is extended with what Margaret Stetz terms "genre crossing" in her argument of genre at the fin de siècle, that in the 1890s, "everyone—reviewers, bookbuyers, other publishers, and authors—[were encouraged] to think beyond the law of genre and to experiment with writing that crossed boundaries."3 Even earlier, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for instance, famously argued for a new poetic form when writing Aurora Leigh: not only an amalgamation of verse forms but "one that would adapt established styles to contemporary needs."4 Victorian poetry, therefore, is marked by its experimental nature and its publicly oriented focus on "contemporary needs." Indeed, one might argue that this public focus is further solidified with poetry's natural integration with visual culture and its situation within lived experience and sociality. Looking inward and outward, prompted by new modalities (and new combinations) in the visual and written arts, the Victorians, it seems, were natural disrupters. And what better time to be reconsidering the possibilities of disruption than in 2022, following a pandemic, an ongoing climate crisis, and the global rise of authoritarianism leading to the January 6 uprising, its aftermath, and the repeal of Roe v. Wade? In the Oxford English Dictionary, "disrupt," as a verb, is defined...

The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry, by Reza Taher-Kermani

Reviewed by: The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry by Reza Taher-Kermani Annmarie Drury (bio) The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry, by Reza Taher-Kermani; pp. vi + 231. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, $110.00, $24.95 paper. In The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry, Reza Taher-Kermani has written a welcome study illuminating how elements of Persian language, literature, and culture circulate in Victorian poetry. British conceptions and misconceptions mediate those elements, and part of the work this book performs is tracing the development and transmission of ideas about Persia in the anglophone sphere. Taher-Kermani's approach in examining translation alongside works originally written in English is important and persuasive, as is the understanding of cultural mobility at work in his term "presence." An English text does not have to be translated from Persian or even "on or about Persia" (2) to manifest Persian "presence," which denotes a "spectrum of literary engagements including translation, imitation, interpretation, representation, conscious allusion, and indirect borrowing" (4) that operate with varying "levels of intensity and significance" in a poem (2). The first two chapters take up the history of representation of Persia and patterns of imaginative engagement with it. Chapter 1, "Persia in the West," starting with classical Greece, steps in long strides to cover its territory, yet it nevertheless offers an argument. Two threads run through anglophone ideas about Persia, Taher-Kermani asserts: an ancient, mythical/romantic one deriving from the Bible and classical Greece, and another deriving from "real-world" interactions (13). The latter does not cancel the former. In a theme that unifies his study, he finds "the persistence of an ancient or mythic Persia" when "actual knowledge of the country was increasing" (13). The activity of the brothers Anthony and Robert Sherley in the Safavid court at the turn of the seventeenth century provides a paradigm for how "political aims in Persia lead to imaginative manifestations of 'Persia' in England," and Taher-Kermani sees this pattern at work "in the conception of every major work of Persian nature or origin in nineteenth-century Britain" (28). There is good discussion of Sir William Jones and his strategies for raising the esteem of Persian literature among anglophone readers. Chapter 2, "Persia and Nineteenth-Century English Poetry," aims to show the diverse ways in which Persia inhabits nineteenth-century poetry by reporting on Taher-Kermani's study of a corpus of some 370 poems. Various patterns emerge: the prominence of the trope of the garden, for example, and within that, the poet Henry Alford's use of garden elements to signal mood in a Persian style in his historical-fanciful poem "Henry Martyn at Shiraz" (1851). Where did Alford learn to do this? Perhaps from translations of Hafiz, Taher-Kermani suggests. Omar Khayyám, as author, name, and idea, is unsurprisingly prominent in Taher-Kermani's corpus, but other Persian writers less familiar to Victorianists—such as the thirteenth-century poet Sa'di—have significant presence too. The chapter also traces attitudes toward Firdausi's epic Shahnameh (1010), including the influential skepticism of E. G. Browne. Altogether, it conveys a sense of the context from and into which the poems central to the next chapters emerged. The next three chapters move chronologically through poems by Matthew Arnold, Edward FitzGerald, and Robert Browning. Chapter 3 explores Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum" (1853). Taher-Kermani traces its textual ancestry to a review in 1850 by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (whom Arnold greatly admired) of a French translation of the Shahnameh by Julius von Mohl. In this heavily mediated encounter with Firdausi, Arnold's [End Page 327] use of Sainte-Beuve has a "paradoxical" quality (10), since Sainte-Beuve believed "primary" epic (such as Firdausi's or Homer's) was "unrepeatable" (126). The chain of transmission illustrates how a Victorian poet could use Persian source material without reading either Persian or even an English translation of a Persian text, but this chapter becomes most interesting when it examines the text of Arnold's poem, particularly its epic similes. Taher-Kermani shows, for example, how a simile centered in the fallen pillars of Persepolis—delivered as a bereft Rustum sits by the son he has...

Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences: Poetical Matter, by Gregory Tate | Constance Naden: Scientist, Philosopher, Poet, by Clare Stainthorp

Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences: Poetical Matter, by Gregory Tate | Constance Naden: Scientist, Philosopher, Poet, by Clare Stainthorp

Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry, by Chris Jones

<i>Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry</i>, by Chris Jones

Illustrated Poetry in Belgravia: An Exploration in Pedagogy and Collaborative Research

Using our own partnership as a case study, this essay suggests new opportunities for collaborative research with students in periodical studies. We discuss the history of collaboration in periodicals pedagogy before turning to two self-reflective pieces (one from the faculty-instructor perspective and one from the student view) on introducing undergraduate students to indexing nineteenth-century poetry for the Periodical Poetry Index. Demonstrating the value of collaborative research experiences between faculty and students, we end with a discussion of our findings from indexing illustrated verse in Belgravia: A London Magazine (1866–99).

Le « Troubadour prisonnier » et la noblesse de Courlande : le dialogue culturel autour du livre français

L’article propose une analyse d’un recueil manuscrit de poèmes rédigé par un officier français inconnu, prisonnier dans le gouvernement de Courlande après la guerre de 1812. Les poésies de circonstance relèvent du style troubadour, entré à la mode au début du XIXe siècle. Les textes du recueil témoignent de l’engagement du prisonnier dans la sociabilité locale et ses bons contacts avec les élites de la région. La compréhension entre l’auteur et ses hôtes repose sur l’intérêt commun pour le livre, la littérature française et la maîtrise des normes de sociabilité conçues par la culture aristocratique française et adoptées dans l’Empire de Russie au tournant du XIXe siècle. À la suite du dialogue poétique, surgit une identité de groupe particulière. Transmise dans la langue internationale de l’Europe, cette identité ne contredit pas les sentiments patriotiques, ni ne gêne l’expression du caractère national.

“Bloomluxuriance”

Joseph Phelan, “‘Bloomluxuriance’: Compound Words in the Poetry of the 1830s and 1840s” (pp. 1–23) The brief interregnum between Romanticism and Victorianism saw the emergence of and retreat from a number of formal and linguistic experiments in poetry. One of the most striking of these is the ostentatious employment of compound words; the early verse of Alfred Tennyson and some of his less-illustrious contemporaries is littered with coinages such as “tendriltwine,” “mellowmature,” and “bloomluxuriance.” The impetus behind this phenomenon came from developments in philology that emphasized the affinities between English and German and from the attempt to broaden the range of English verse by naturalizing metrical forms such as the hexameter, and was often associated with an impassioned if politically unfocused radicalism. In revising “Œnone” for republication in his 1842 Poems, Tennyson excised almost all of these compound words, a gesture of linguistic conformity that is the stylistic counterpart to what Isobel Armstrong calls the “loss of nerve” apparent in his work during this decade, and one that is paralleled in the work of some of his contemporaries. This experimental impulse did not disappear from Victorian poetry completely, however, and its survival helps to explain some of the quainter and more ungainly phenomena of later nineteenth-century verse.

Transatlantic Address: Washington Allston and the Limits of Romanticism

Transatlantic Address: Washington Allston and the Limits of Romanticism Meredith L. McGill (bio) One of the most interesting phases of jerome mcgann’s career has been his recent turn to writing about nineteenth-century American literature. One might say this turn isn’t altogether recent: his 1993 book on “The Visible Language of Modernism” takes its title from Stephen Crane’s Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and includes a sustained meditation on Emily Dickinson’s investment in the visual aspect of her writing.1 But since 2014, when he published two books—A New Republic of Letters, which includes substantial chapters on Edgar Allan Poe and James Fenimore Cooper, and The Poet Edgar Allan Poe—the pendulum of McGann’s attention has swung decisively in a transatlantic direction.2 This shift is particularly welcome to those who study nineteenth-century American literature—and especially American poetry—within a transatlantic context. A prominent Romanticist’s fascination with American texts and cultural formations does much to counter asymmetries in prestige and in critical attention that have long structured the transatlantic literary field. Admittedly, most students of nineteenth-century literature on both sides of the Atlantic have been content to write national histories that rarely, if ever, intersect with one another. Critics have addressed the great themes of Atlantic history, recognizing the importance of transatlantic trade and the transformative effects of the forced and voluntary migration of peoples, but they have done so largely from within the confines of nationally framed literary traditions. Indeed, as I noted over a decade ago in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008), it would be difficult to underestimate the sway of the idea of a national literature over the discipline of literary study, structuring as it still does undergraduate [End Page 475] instruction, graduate training, and professional formation.3 A tacit or explicit literary nationalism continues to organize departments of English despite the fact that complexly intertwining histories of language and culture, publication, and literary form tug against the often unquestioned binary division of the field into British and American literatures. While specialists in nineteenth-century Anglophone literature share an atavistic, nationalist commitment to our materials of study, asymmetries of attention rooted in Romantic-era hierarchies of value continue to ensure that, while Americanists must grapple with British literary precedent and evaluate the literature they study against the backdrop of the dominant tradition, Romanticists and Victorianists are free to ignore contemporaneous literary production in Great Britain’s former American colonies. Even important recent scholarship that boldly reconceives nineteenth-century British literature in transnational terms repeats this omission: Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (2017) and Jason R. Rudy’s Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies (2017) track the colonial uptake of British poetic forms and poetic ideals in India, British Guiana, Australia, Canada, and South Africa, but omit Britain’s former colony, the newly independent United States, from their field of vision.4 In Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2016), Daniel Hack examines the complexity of African American writers’ engagement with a broad range of British texts, but treats African American literature largely in isolation from larger trends in American literary history.5 The rising prestige of the American novel in the twentieth century has ensured that numerous comparative studies embrace the work of writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, and James,6 but the exclusion of [End Page 476] nineteenth-century American poetry from serious transnational consideration—outside of the work of our two proto-modernists, Whitman and Dickinson—is striking.7 One can easily lay the blame for this omission at the feet of Americanist critics who tend to regard Americanness in poetry as discernible only in a break with British poetic norms. We have only recently begun to develop a critical language nuanced and flexible enough to describe the heady mix of cosmopolitanism and provinciality, originality and imitation, postcoloniality, and national and imperial ambition that characterizes metrically regular, formally recognizable American verse. Americanists tend to be embarrassed by the bombastic claims made by nineteenth-century poets and critics who proclaimed the virtues of now-obscure...

La poésie délivrée: le livre en question du Parnasse à Mallarmé par Nicolas Valazza

Reviewed by: La poésie délivrée: le livre en question du Parnasse à Mallarmé par Nicolas Valazza Kate M. Bonin Valazza, Nicolas. La poésie délivrée: le livre en question du Parnasse à Mallarmé. Droz, 2018. ISBN 978-2-600-05894-0. Pp. 336. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the publishing industry was booming: between 12,000 and 15,000 works published annually in France alone (20). Yet works of poetry were largely left out of this vast literary production. Valazza draws attention to how few of the canonical books of late nineteenth-century poetry actually were books: that is, printed, published, and promptly made available for purchase. Between censorship, posthumous publication, and even outright abandonment by their author (to cite one famous example, Rimbaud's 500 copies of Une saison en enfer, printed in 1873 but left at the publisher's shop, unclaimed and undiscovered until 1901), there is an important time gap between the production and critical reception of late nineteenth-century poetry, argues Valazza. The thesis of La poésie délivrée is that serious attempts to trace the evolution of poetic "modernity" must take into account poetry's chancy appearance and slow incubation, in distinct opposition to [End Page 238] the heyday of Romantic superstars such as Hugo, Vigny, and Lamartine. Valazza traces Parnassian poets' efforts to differentiate their aesthetic from the Romantics', not just in style, but also in form of delivery: e.g., poets banding together in collective volumes of the Parnasse contemporain rather than single-author published books. Yet the Commune divided Parnassian poets politically, sinking the commercial fortunes of pro-Commune poets such as Verlaine and Rimbaud even further. Moving away from Parnassus and its most popular voice, the now-all-but-forgotten Academician François Coppée, more licentious works (in both senses) opposed the moral posturing of the Second Empire and the Third Republic, but they also opposed the formal rigidity of Parnassus. Valazza analyzes these angry, funny, often scabrous works of older authors such as Gautier and Baudelaire, as well as younger voices (Verlaine, Glatigny, Rimbaud). These "marginal" works, cut, censored or blocked from "legitimate" publication, found expression in clandestine or anonymous editions, as well as ephemera such as short-lived reviews, albums, and cabaret performance. One example: the six poems censored from the 1857 Fleurs du mal wound up in Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle, secretly published in Brussels. Valazza deftly traces the intertextuality between such works as the Album zutique and Verlaine's Cellulairement (written while the poet was incarcerated in Belgium 1873–75, unpublished until 1992), and François Coppée's bland (but popular) mediocrity. What more fitting illustration of "unliterary literature" (163) than Rimbaud's Illuminations: the scattered prose poems abandoned by Rimbaud himself, cobbled together by the Symbolist poet Gustave Kahn and published in partial form in 1886 (long after Rimbaud's own renunciation of the literary field): "un livre qui reste, en quelque sorte, en devenir," Valazza proposes (190). Rimbaud's (un)achievement prefigures Mallarmé's efforts to conceive an impossible "Livre," somehow dé-livré "du livre conventionnel" (216), leading to creative experiments with typography, use of white space, thickness of the paper and size of the page, but also (especially) to very little finished product. Memorable and thought-provoking, La poésie délivrée is a smart addition to studies of nineteenth-century poetry and the slippery evolutions of modernity. Kate M. Bonin Arcadia University (PA) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

The aesthetics of the religious and the sacralization of “positivist” science – “idealism” (Adam Asnyk) and decadent religious poetry of early modernism (Stanisław Korab-Brzozowski)

Religious images and motives in nineteenth-century poetry (particularly in the period of dominant Positivism) became gradually aestheticized and lost much their original symbolic impact. This was partly due to the consequences of Kantian philosophy that introduce a dichotomy between phenomena and noumena. Positivism was merely interested in the relation between objects belonging to the phenomenal world. Critical theology (D.F. Strauss, Ernest Renan) started to analyze religious symbols and New Testament stories from the point of view of history and (compared) myth, applying positivist methodology to the “humanities”. Poets wishing to recapture the religious potential (the “Holy”) of traditional symbols and ritual had to recontextualize them. The “sacred” does not reside in the symbols themselves, but it is transferred to the relation established by the individual between his position in the world and a symbol or ritual. The religious moment results from experiencing this “unrepeatable” relation (its unrepeatability being the condition of contact with transcendence, relating the symbol as phenomenon with the noumenal sphere that is present as a trace – the individually experienced symbol points to its absence). In Polish late romantic poetry (e.g. Adam Asnyk) the individualization of the experience of transcendence is impeded by the patriotic connotations of religious symbols and rituals that presuppose the experience of belonging to a (“national”) community (a “relic” of Polish romantic messianism, c.f. the aftermath of the January Uprising). The modernist poet Stanisław Korab Brzozowski succeeded in developing a poetic method of recontextualizing traditional religious symbols that allowed to show the incompatibility between the phenomenal and the noumenal sphere as an inner experience of a subject (e.g. a wooden cross stretching its arms to an empty heaven) as a direct reaction to Renan´s relativization of the Christian “Heilsgeschichte”, unmediated by Polish romantic messianism).

Chris Jones, Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Chris Jones, Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

Chris Jones. Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Chris Jones. Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

The Rise of Proto-Environmentalism in George Eliot

AbstractThe “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways in which George Eliot's nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article traces the development of Eliot's ecological literacy, beginning with her scientific field observations that incubated what would become her lifelong literary aesthetic of moral sympathy put forth in “The Natural History of German Life.” Eliot's initial moral sympathy advanced to an ecotheological perspective made visible in both Eliot's unpublished lyric poem “Ex Oriente Lux” and her canonic verse “A Minor Prophet.” Eliot's early and mature writings countervailed the competing discourses of theology and science as they relate to the natural environment.

Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like “Here,” “This,” “Come.” Heather Dubrow. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. viii+135.

<i>Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like “Here,” “This,” “Come.”</i> Heather Dubrow. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. viii+135.

La Lecture by Jan Baetens, Milan Chlumsky

Reviewed by: La Lecture by Jan Baetens, Milan Chlumsky Peter Consenstein Baetens, Jan, and Milan Chlumsky. La Lecture. Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2017. 98pp. When poetry and photography begin a discussion, even a polite one, what role does the reader/viewer play? Does he or she take the event into account, is the discussion read or watched, or is it the interactivity between the two media that draws attention? Taking the event into account might be the only honest choice when, paradoxically, the reader’s eyes are at first listening to the words that the mind is configuring based on the visual form of the letters appearing on the page and then attempting to link those images to the photos. The least that can be asked of readers is to keep an open mind when opening La Lecture by Jan Baetens and Milan Chlumsky. Baetens and Chlumsky address two paintings by Henri Fantin-Latour (1870 Henri Fantin-Latour (1877) entitled La Lecture, the obvious inspiration for their book, which is divided into three parts: a series entitled Feu (“Fire”) of thirteen of Chlumsky’s photos separated by blank pages, followed by forty fourteen-line poems written by Baetens that recall the length of the traditional sonnet. The conversation between the two media ends with a series of ten photos, also separated by blank pages and titled Mouvement. In their introduction, “Lire, cet acte” (“Reading, that act”; all translations mine), Baetens and Chlumsky lay out their objectives. They make believe that they are entering into the chamber that Fantin-Latour painted and where two women are seated, one reading aloud to the other. All three of them, Fantin-Latour, Baetens and Chlumsky, are attempting to exploit and enrich “cette idée de silence” (“this idea of silence” [5]), a silence that plays a particular role, one that offers two women “l’évasion par la lecture” (“a reading-evasion”) and allows them to occupy “un monde à elles” (“a world of their own” [6]). The evasion, as well as the distance taken from the reality of their chamber, attract Baetens and Chlumsky, who decided to show what the painter says (6) without “tomber dans les facilités de l’anachronisme ou de l’actualisation” (“falling into the comfort of anachronism and staying current” [6–7]). In effect, the two Fantin-Latour paintings communicate the embodiment of distance that a shared, private, and intimate reading create. Since the paintings form a sort of “tableau double”—the first one painted in 1870 and then retaken in 1877—Baetens and Chlumsky’s book also takes on the form of a two-winged diptych, one written, the other [End Page 103] photographic. The heart of their project expresses, they hope, the “liberté inconditionnelle” (“unconditional freedom”) that is derived from “une certaine idée de la lecture” (“a particular idea of reading” [8]), a freedom that puts into play prose, words, literarity, spoken-word reading, all of them contributing, with the photographs, to a new omni-visual experience of reading. In this book, a painter from over 150 years ago partners with a poet and a photographer particularly sensitive to contemporary culture. Baetens and Chlumsky are set comfortably in the twenty-first century, so they are well aware of the challenges facing poetry and reading, yet they find their inspiration in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century poetry and painting offer up versions of modernity, the activities of daily life; they are lyrical and even express the social results of the industrial revolution, whereas the twenty-first century advances a visual cultural involving cinematic features, inter-modality and the digital era. The first series of photographs, Feu (Fire), combines the two periods. Its photos of an old warehouse fire reveal patterns and emptiness. Because of the fire, outside light filters through missing ceilings, highlighting its bricks, wooden doors and windows, twisted steel beams and cement floors. Chlumsky’s photos focus on this abandoned warehouse, which appears to serve as a home for the homeless but no longer fulfills its original function. The photographer highlights the patterns created by the burning flames on the walls and facades that, like cryptic letters, communicate a destructive, transformative, and embellishing force. How then to...