The Lyric in Victorian Memory - Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman

This book is a study of nineteenth-century poems that remember, yearn for, fixate on, and forget the past. Reflecting the current critical drive to reconcile formalist and historicist approaches to literature, it uses close readings to trace the complex interactions between memory as a theme and the (often-memorable) formal traits - such as brevity, stanzaic structure, and sonic repetition - that appear in the lyrics examined. This book considers the interwoven nature of remembering and forgetting in the work of four Victorian poets.  It uses this theme to shed new light on the relationship between lyric and narrative, on the connections between gender and genre, and on the way in which Victorians represented and commemorated the past.

List of contents

1. Introduction.-  2.Tennyson's Lyric Betrayals: Feminine Re-Formation in The Princess and InMemoriam.- 3. Remembering Christina Rossetti: Dead Women and the Afterlife of Lyric.- 4. The Forgetting of Symons: Photographic Memory and Formal Reincarnation.- 5. Amnesia and Nostalgia in Housman's A Shropshire Lad: "What are those blue remembered hills?".- Coda.- Bibliography.-

About the author

Veronica Alfano is Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, and Research Fellow at Australian Catholic University, Australia.  She is the co-editor (with Andrew Stauffer) of Virtual Victorians:  Networks, Connections, Technologies.

Summary

This book is a study of nineteenth-century poems that remember, yearn for, fixate on, and forget the past. Reflecting the current critical drive to reconcile formalist and historicist approaches to literature, it uses close readings to trace the complex interactions between memory as a theme and the (often-memorable) formal traits – such as brevity, stanzaic structure, and sonic repetition – that appear in the lyrics examined. This book considers the interwoven nature of remembering and forgetting in the work of four Victorian poets.  It uses this theme to shed new light on the relationship between lyric and narrative, on the connections between gender and genre, and on the way in which Victorians represented and commemorated the past.

Product details

• Authors: Veronica Alfano
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.01.2018
• EAN: 9783319846156
• ISBN: 978-3-31-984615-6
• No. of pages: 372
• Dimensions: 148 mm x 20 mm x 210 mm
• Weight: 501 g
• Illustrations: XI, 372 p.
• Series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Europa, B, Literature, Historiography, Memory Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature: history & criticism, Literature, Modern—19th century, Nineteenth-Century Literature, British literature, British and Irish Literature