Peer Reviewed Articles by Heather Bozant Witcher
Victoriographies. Special Issue on 150th anniversary of D.G. Rossetti’s "Poems." , 2020
Eds. Dinah Roe and Serena Trowbridge. Forthcoming 2020. Solicited.
In the last years of his li... more Eds. Dinah Roe and Serena Trowbridge. Forthcoming 2020. Solicited.
In the last years of his life, Dante Gabriel Rossetti provided a bit of advice to Thomas Hall Craine: “Conception, my boy, fundamental brainwork, that is what makes all the difference in art.” Included in this demand for intellectuality in poetry, I argue that Rossetti incorporates the brainwork of community, of deriving creative inspiration from his fraternity. Intellectuality, for Rossetti, is founded on a collaborative sense of creation: the intimacy of shared thought and liberal exchange.
By imagining the lyric’s future in 1870, Rossetti established a way forward for the materiality of poetry through aural and visual rhythm and “culturally resonant form,” as Elizabeth Helsinger has recently argued. By tracing the creative process in the archival drafts of “Eden Bower,” I demonstrate the intellectual ardor and creative exertion contained within each of Rossetti’s poems. I posit that such a process becomes embedded in his prosody (or affective music of verse), particularly, as this article will explore, the rhythm of the refrain ballads in the first part of Poems. In doing so, I suggest that Poems offers a response akin to William Morris’s usage of the performative lyric as a transformation of collective, social fellowship, while providing, also, a framework for defining the lyric potential of Pre-Raphaelite poetics.
It is well recognized that Rossetti sought advice and suggestions from friends and fellow poets at every stage in the creation and publication of Poems. And yet, there has been little attention given to Rossetti’s responses when offered those recommendations. Preserved within the archive, Rossetti’s material response to these suggestions can be witnessed in his revisions to his poetry. By analyzing these drafts alongside the correspondence, I demonstrate the ways in which Rossetti’s lyric form and innovation is indebted to fraternal brainwork. “I hardly ever do produce a sonnet except on some basis of special momentary emotion,” wrote Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Bell Scott on 25 August 1871. “But I think there is another class admissible also—and that is the only other I practice […which is dependent] on a line or two clearly given you, you know not whence, and calling up a sequence of ideas.” As part of his experimental poetics, Rossetti integrates this fraternal exchange of ideas as a way of shaping and reinventing lyric matter.
Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive
Forthcoming Book Chapter. Outcome from NEH Summer Seminar, 2017.
In her 1947 letters to her ps... more Forthcoming Book Chapter. Outcome from NEH Summer Seminar, 2017.
In her 1947 letters to her psychoanalyst Ruth Foster, Elizabeth Bishop writes that the psychoanalytic process revealed to her that her “fear of repetition” impacted her craft and poetic process: “so far I have regarded every single poem as something absolutely new—I know this can’t quite be true because people have told me I do have a style of my own or a speaking voice of my own or something but I’ve never been able to feel it myself—they all sound quite different to me.” To counteract this desire to make every poem “new,” Bishop ends her intimation to Foster in this opening paragraph with a firmly stated resolution. Rather than “isolated events,” Bishop declares new insight into her poetry as part of a cohesive collection: “I feel that in poetry now there is no reason why I should make such an effort to make each poem an isolated event, that they go on into each other or over lap etc., and are really all one long poem anyway.”
Taking Bishop’s own exploration of her poetry as “really all one long poem” that overlaps or goes “into one another,” this chapter investigates two canonical Bishop poems: “The Armadillo” and “The Moose.” Both focus on the establishment of voice—or, as Bishop points out to Foster—several different sounding voices; however, critical attention has not yet explored how these animal poems—in their manuscript forms—shed light on Bishop’s creative process, with its attention to polyphony and motion. Bishop’s careful craft and fastidious revision have long guided representations of her writing style. However, scholarship has yet to embark on a truly critical analysis of this brilliant perfection. Such an analysis requires an understanding of Bishop’s drafting process as it is revealed in archival materials. Here, I suggest that we can begin to explore the notion of polyphonic blending conveyed by Bishop to Foster with our own form of archival blending: integrating the various textures, materials, and influences upon Bishop’s entire oeuvre, composed of poetry, prose, correspondence, photography, artwork.
In the spirit of genetic criticism, I first provide an analysis of the revisionary processes uncovered in the drafts of “The Armadillo” and “The Moose.” In doing so, this chapter reveals Bishop’s conviction that poetic craft is tied to musical theory. Bishop established such convictions as an undergraduate at Vassar and honed them through epistolary dialogue and poetic experimentation. Juxtaposing Bishop’s poetic process with her interest in music and art illuminates her usage of motion, temporality, and spatiality within poetic form and style. Linking “The Armadillo” with “The Moose” via their emphasis on polyphony and motion—both in content, form, and in the various drafts of the poems—this chapter prompts scholarship to question how Bishop uses various media to think through her poetry. She not only visualizes her poem, crystallizing images in beautiful verse; she hears the poem and explores aspects of motion in her creative process. Indeed, the literal moving around of words, stanzas, and rhythm within the archival pages can be read as a training ground for the polyphonic movement ultimately embedded within the structure and tone of the finalized poems.
Victorian Poetry, Dec 2017
It is no coincidence that during the same period in which Michael Field believed their work symbo... more It is no coincidence that during the same period in which Michael Field believed their work symbolized resurrection and renewal, the cultural moment of the 1890s encouraged artists to gain interest in blurring genre lines. This article suggests that the rise of a “decadent poetic drama,” to borrow Ana Parejo Vadillo’s categorization of Michael Field’s historical dramas, comes in part not, as the couple’s contemporaries and immediate antecedents argue, from a lack of form, but from formal experimentation. If Aristotle believed drama to be an imitation of action, and mimesis to be a showing (or representation) versus a narrative retelling of that action, Michael Field refashions the formal history of drama by playing with voice, rhythm, and structure. Further, I speculate that the couple experiments with ballad meter in The Tragic Mary to incorporate a social mimesis founded on female community and contagious transference, or transport. In this play, Mary Stuart’s three ballads enact an affective communal experience that enables expressions of female desire. The ballad meter, I suggest, enacts the role of affective transport with its contagious meter and rhythm.
Forum for Modern Language Studies 52.2 Special Issue. "Co-Constructions of Self: Nineteenth-Century Collaborative Life-Writing.", Apr 2016
This article examines Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1814 shared elopement journal, evide... more This article examines Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1814 shared elopement journal, evidencing the initial collaboration between the couple, to trace the ways in which formal elements of the journal’s entries illuminate the interlocked system of collaborative connection and interpersonal identification engaged in the couple. Tracing the entries as a way of marking the couple’s convergence, and examining Godwin and Shelley’s attempt to redefine themselves from singular individualism to radical pluralism, this article considers the beginnings of a sympathetic collaboration taking place within the journal’s shared pages. The elopement journal supports, in a broader sense, a new understanding of literary collaboration that is necessarily informed by the mechanics of the writing process, illustrated in the formal elements of the prose and textual or marginal traces within the manuscripts. The private circulation of feeling and sympathy within individual entries mimics the physical circulation of texts and ideas between the couple.
Awards by Heather Bozant Witcher
Grant provided to begin international archival research for new monograph project, "Drafting the ... more Grant provided to begin international archival research for new monograph project, "Drafting the Pre-Raphaelites."
Saint Louis University English Department, Research Excellence
One-month joint fellowship co-sponsored by the University of Delaware Library and the Delaware Ar... more One-month joint fellowship co-sponsored by the University of Delaware Library and the Delaware Art Museum intended for scholars working on the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates. The fellowship includes stipend and housing accomodations during residence in Delaware.
Competitive fellowship given by William Morris Society of the US for scholarly research on Willia... more Competitive fellowship given by William Morris Society of the US for scholarly research on William Morris. The award was used to fund research expenses to the Morgan Library.
Invited Lecture by Heather Bozant Witcher
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artists were famous for their lush paintings and beautiful poetry-... more The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artists were famous for their lush paintings and beautiful poetry--as well as their complicated interpersonal relationships. This lecture examines one of these dynamic relationships: the collaboration between painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister, Christina Rossetti. By studying the artistic interactions of these talented siblings, I argue, we can better understand the ways in which interpersonal relationships impacted the production of art in the nineteenth century.
Presented July 27, 2016 while in residence in Delaware as the recipient of the 2016 Amy P. Goldman Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies
Conference Presentations (Selected) by Heather Bozant Witcher
Presentation at NAVSA 2018. October 11-14, 2018
Victorian photography is en vogue. Recent Londo... more Presentation at NAVSA 2018. October 11-14, 2018
Victorian photography is en vogue. Recent London exhibitions have demonstrated the centrality of the technological medium and Victorian usage of the photographic lens. Photography enables a “looking outward” and formulates an artistic and experimental vision of the Victorian world. The National Portrait Gallery’s current Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography is the first exhibition to examine the relationship between photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Lady Clementina Hawarden, and Oscar Rejlander. It showcases how these figures, according to the exhibition catalog, “formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future.” Defying earlier conventions of stiff, dull portraiture, mid-century Victorian photographers turned the medium into an art form. Perhaps this is why prior exhibitions, like the Tate’s Painting with Light (2016), explored the visual connections between photographs and British art movements, including Pre-Raphaelite, aesthetic, and impressionist works. Yet while recent attention has been given to the links between photography and painting, what of the connections between nineteenth-century photography and poetry?
This presentation seeks to illuminate the connections between art photography and Pre-Raphaelite poetry. It draws from the photographic process of Julia Margaret Cameron and her poem “On a Portrait” (1875; 1876) in addition to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s usage of photography as an aid to his art and the revisionary process of his so-called “double works.” I argue that we ought to view literary Pre-Raphaelitism as innovatively experimental, and reliant upon a revived focus on the creative process, revealed in the archive. William Bell Scott’s famous claim that “the seed of the flower of Pre-Raphaelitism was photography,” is often connected to the detail of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Such painting emulates the camera’s perfection, transforming John Everett Millais’ Ophelia into the exact image of Lizzie Siddal drowning. But what could this claim mean for Pre-Raphaelite poetry? I suggest that the photographic medium energized Pre-Raphaelite poetic style by allowing the poet to look and feel outward: to blur the boundaries between the domestic and the foreign in a way that was both defiant and innocuous. As pioneers of experimentalism, known for subversion of form and convention, these artists also play it safe by using the displacement of the photographic lens to depict foreign subjects within a supremely British context.
Turning to the revisionary processes of these Pre-Raphaelite artists, revealed in the archives of the British Library and Victoria & Albert Museum, this presentation will look beyond the traditional literary canon to focus on the “unfinished.” By questioning the definition of a “finished” product, my project establishes the symbiotic relationship among literary drafts, artistic sketches, and finalized art. Investigating the multimodal processes of Cameron and Rossetti as a continual perfection of style and aesthetic perception aligns with a view of literary Pre-Raphaelitism as experimental. I argue for a revived focus on the creative process to show the influences of varied mediums—poetry, painting, photography—upon a single work by contributing to an understanding of the photographic imagination’s centrality to Pre-Raphaelite poetic form.
Presentation at MLA 2018, January 4-7, part of panel "Pre-Raphaelites and the Pierpont Morgan Lib... more Presentation at MLA 2018, January 4-7, part of panel "Pre-Raphaelites and the Pierpont Morgan Library."
In 1898, an anonymous contributor to the Daily Chronicle suggested that William Morris had dishonestly failed to acknowledge the role of Robert Catterson-Smith as collaborator of Edward Burne-Jones in the Chaucer. Such accusations brought the legacy of the Kelmscott Press under attack and prompted responses from both Catterson-Smith and Sydney Cockerell, private secretary of the Press and Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. “Fingers, eyes, and sympathy I brought,” wrote Catterson-Smith, “but Sir Edward was responsible for every line and dot in the eighty “Chaucer” drawings which I did under his guidance.”
What, exactly, was Catterson-Smith’s role as collaborator? Examining such a question relies upon the Pre-Raphaelite archive at the Morgan Library. The Morgan’s holdings include a number of Catterson-Smith ephemera and correspondence, including an autographed manuscript in which Catterson-Smith describes his intensive process of translation (MA 8593). Far more importantly, the Morgan holds the aforementioned Chaucer illustrations: 86 platintotype reproductions of Burne-Jones’s drawings, reworked in black and white Chinese ink by Catterson-Smith for the engravers of the woodcuts. In this presentation, I examine the Morgan’s holdings to reproduce the collaborative process between Catterson-Smith and Burne-Jones. This archive preserves the individual stages of what Morris called “sympathetic translation,” and provides significant insight into the creation of what is commonly perceived as a joint project between Burne-Jones and Morris. Probing into the complexity of the Kelmscott collaborations attests to the sociability of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Pre-Raphaelite focus on cooperation and lived communal experience.
Presentation at NAVSA 2017, November 16-18
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s obsessive revisions to his p... more Presentation at NAVSA 2017, November 16-18
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s obsessive revisions to his poetry and artwork are well-known to Pre-Raphaelite scholars and offer, at times, an elusive portrayal of his creative process, while providing insight into his conception of the “inner standing-point.” This presentation will examine Pre-Raphaelite processes of revision, preserved in archival materials, in order to explore the symbiotic relationship among literary drafts, artistic sketches, and finalized products.
Investigating the multimodal revisionary processes of the Pre-Raphaelites as a continual perfection of their literary style and aesthetic perceptions aligns with a view of literary Pre-Raphaelitism as innovatively experimental. I argue for a revived focus on the creative process revealed in the archive to show the influences of varied mediums—poetry, painting, photography—upon a single work, and question how this multimodal process forms a cornerstone of Pre-Raphaelite literary style by contributing to an understanding of Rossetti’s “inner standing-point.” This presentation acknowledges the preservation of various mediums at work “often overlapping and contradicting with each other, sometimes within a single figure’s work.” These competing mediums determine and contribute to Pre-Raphaelite form.
Rossetti’s creative impulse is revisionary, often using various mediums to continually refine his sensory perceptions and prosodic technique. Here, I focus on “The Blessed Damozel,” closely reading the evolution of style perfected across drafts and artistic productions. I conclude by placing Rossetti’s style alongside that of his pupil and wife, Lizzie Siddal. Siddal’s archive presents a challenge due to its incompleteness and uncertainty of sequence. Yet, when attempting a definition of Pre-Raphaelitism that expands beyond the famed Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Siddal’s poetic and aesthetic style remains integral to determining the impact of Pre-Raphaelitism upon poetic tradition. Throughout this presentation, I suggest that a reconsideration of Pre-Raphaelite drafting techniques revealed in manuscripts, sketches, and ephemera illuminates the overlapping influences of multiple media as a means of revising and perfecting style.
Upcoming presentation at MMLA, November 10-13, 2016.
This presentation will begin with J. David B... more Upcoming presentation at MMLA, November 10-13, 2016.
This presentation will begin with J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin’s definition of remediation to focus on conceptions of digital pedagogy as a form of boundary work. Using student examples in the form of podcasts, infographics, and digital exhibitions (Omeka), I will demonstrate how my college classroom uses digital pedagogy to encourage students to become self-reflexive in their enactment of cognitive and affective experiences, produced by their own compositions. These compositions stretch or cross boundaries through the transparency and/or immediacy that is generated through multimodal composition. Remediation is not a repurposing of one medium in the form of another medium; instead, as Bolter and Grusin argue, remediation is a self-reflexive adoption of one medium by another. As a process, Bolter and Grusin define remediation as “the mediation of mediation;” in other words, “media are continually commenting upon, reproducing and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media.” Indeed, as a process of reform, the explicit goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media. Thus, remediation reinterprets the boundaries between media in a process of transformation, or reformation of reality.
Further, through an analysis of both my students’ compositions and my experience as an instructor in the literature and composition classrooms, my presentation will also look at the limitations of considering multimodal compositions as remediation. Guided by Collin Brooke’s argument that remediation does not quite encompass the ability of new media to invent new forms of mediation, I will demonstrate the implications that this limitation has on my pedagogical practices. For instance, incorporating blogs in the classroom does not exactly constitute a remediation journal. As a whole, this presentation will use student examples as case studies for innovative uses of digital pedagogy in order to demonstrate how remediation traverses boundaries through self-reflexive expressions produced by multimodal compositions conceived as New (re)Media(ation).
Upcoming Presentation at NAVSA 2016, November 2-5.
The diaries of Michael Field—the collaborativ... more Upcoming Presentation at NAVSA 2016, November 2-5.
The diaries of Michael Field—the collaborative pseudonym used by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper—narrate their participation in social networks comprised of leading figures in the literary and artistic world: John Ruskin, William Butler Yeats, and Walter Pater, to name a select few. In conjunction with this social network is the personal relationship and literary collaboration between the long-term partners. This presentation will demonstrate that collaboration is a means of artistic construction and a lived experience of communal relations.
Here, I argue that in their verse drama, The Tragic Mary (1890)—based on Mary Stuart—I argue that Michael Field experiments with poetic meter to create a social mimesis founded on female community and contagious transference, or sympathetic transport. I will turn to Adam Smith’s understanding of sympathy as a social process—which is dependent upon imaginative transport—in which individuals feel with and for others. This paper will argue that Michael Field creates a formal structure within their drama that mirrors their own collaboration, which is rooted in the social. The ballad, with its contagious meter and rhythm within The Tragic Mary, in particular, enacts an affective communal experience that enables expressions of female desire through the process of sympathetic transport.
Interweaving the couple’s life-writing with their verse drama, my argument will establish a textured understanding of Michael Field’s works by illustrating the collaborative mixture of mediums in both the diaries and the drama. This materiality is essential to understanding the couple’s sympathetic and social collaborative process.
Presented at MLA 2016 in Austin, Texas.
This paper furthers an affective understanding of langua... more Presented at MLA 2016 in Austin, Texas.
This paper furthers an affective understanding of language and art by assessing the sibling relationship between Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the 1850s/1860s. This presentation reveals for the first time the influence of Victorian liberalism and sympathy that underlies the collaborative ideal shared by the Rossettis. Focusing primarily on the complex genesis of "Goblin Market," and the collision of aesthetic modes therein, collaboration takes on two forms: interpersonal and intertextual. Looking at the intricacy of the Rossetti partnership and using Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic “concord” (an affective communal bond occurring between persons within the same circle and with a shared understanding) illuminates the interlocked system of collaborative connection and identification that frames the siblings’ compositional process as one rooted in a lived communal experience. Ultimately, the Rossettis’ interpersonal relationship, revealed through journals and correspondence, becomes enshrined within the poem’s union of illustration and literature, revealing the possibility of a fleeting moment of interpersonal and intertextual concord.
Presented at the British Women Writers Association Conference in New York, June 2015.
In the s... more Presented at the British Women Writers Association Conference in New York, June 2015.
In the second entry of Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s elopement journals, dated July 29, 1814, Mary makes her first contribution: “Mary was there. S.helley was also with me [.]” Here, Mary asserts her own presence, in her own hand, in the concluding words: “with me.” Inserting herself into the lines of the collaborative travel journal, Mary Shelley makes space for her voice, her words, within the collaboration between the couple.
In the 1814 and 1816 travel journals, a sympathetic collaboration takes place during the couple’s early elopement. Indeed, there is evidence of one individual leaving room within the page for later additions by the second individual. I will use Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic concord to illuminate the interlocked system of collaborative connection and interpersonal identification engaged by the couple in their journals. By emphasizing the collaborative relationship, and the ways in which collaboration lends itself to narrative form in the journals’ publication as History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, this paper will demonstrate that a sympathetic concord, a moral community, happens within the very process of collaboration. Insisting that sympathy is much more than simply feeling, I will extend our understanding of minds in concord to provide a framework for analyzing the process of nineteenth century collaboration.
Examining the interchange of ideas and experiences between Godwin and Shelley, this paper will explore issues of gendered control within the collaborative relationship by noting the change of hands and textual space allotted to both individuals, with particular emphasis on Mary’s position within each entry. Importantly, this paper will argue that the elopement journals create a narrative—both in voice and textual space—that mimics the couple’s own vocal blending, or dialogism, in their collaborative entries, just as it realizes the development of Mary’s own literary voice.
Presented November 2014 at the Victorian Studies Colloquium, sponsored by the Gladstone Centre fo... more Presented November 2014 at the Victorian Studies Colloquium, sponsored by the Gladstone Centre for Victorian Studies.
North American Victorian Studies Association Conference. London, Ontario, Canada. November 2014.
... more North American Victorian Studies Association Conference. London, Ontario, Canada. November 2014.
“It was the essence of my undertaking,” wrote William Morris in 1898, “to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type.” With this typographical adventure, I argue that Morris inscribes the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of collaboration into the Kelmscott Press, and into his conception of the ‘ideal book.’ With this inscription, the Kelmscott Press embodies a transhistorical collaboration within its very operation, and exemplifies a lived experience of communal relations with which Morris is in sympathetic ‘concord.’
In this paper, I will use Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic “concord” to illuminate the interlocked system of collaborative connection and circular identification (interpersonal and transhistorical) Morris engages through the Kelmscott Press. By insisting that sympathy is much more than simply feeling, this presentation will extend our understanding of minds in “concord” to provide a framework for classifying the process of collaboration. In the brief history of the Kelmscott Press, we witness sympathetic identification with the revised past in order to imagine the possibility of a fleeting moment of concord.
When, in 1891, Morris developed the Kelmscott Press, he enlarged the classification of book production to incorporate aesthetic and social reform, in part, to redeem late-Victorian society from its mechanical ugliness. Morris emphasized the ornamentation of book production in what appears to be a statement about typography and printing, but is actually a statement of the way in which Morris believed society ought to live. Morris imbues his aesthetic press with the qualities of his ideal society, the qualities of sympathetic collaboration. His idealization of medievalism by replicating the aestheticism of illuminated manuscripts emphasizes not only the collaboration venerated by the Pre-Raphaelites, but demonstrates the transhistorical collaboration between Morris’s press and the medieval past.
The working model of the press not only simulates the collaboration of art and literature in the texts produced, but its very project can be classified as transhistorical collaboration not only blurring time, but emphasizing a collision of aesthetic modes and historic moments. By focusing on the Kelmscott Press itself as a model of collaboration, rather than the specific products produced, we can see collaboration and sympathy built into its very mission.
By questioning the collaboration embodied in the Kelmscott Press, we are able to recognize the difficulty of its categorization. How do we classify a single project composed of disparate artistic endeavors? With the Kelmscott Press, we can analyze not only a blending of aesthetic and historic modes, but we can analyze its mission of bringing together multiple professional classes of people in an interpersonal collaborative effort (printers, engravers, editors, illustrators, and authors). By looking at collaboration holistically, we understand that Morris’s pursuit of Pre-Raphaelitism as a way of life becomes enshrined in the Kelmscott Press.
Michael Field Centenary Conference: New Directions in Fin-de-Siecle Studies. London, England. Jul... more Michael Field Centenary Conference: New Directions in Fin-de-Siecle Studies. London, England. July 2014.
“Your Queen,” wrote Oscar Wilde to Michael Field in 1890, “is a splendid creature, a live woman to her finger-tips. I feel the warmth of her breath as I listen to her.” When Michael Field turned to writing historical verse drama, they entered that form’s tradition of recuperating for modern sexual politics the legends of mythic women. By re-animating these arcane female histories—including those of Mary Stuart and the Irish figure, Deirdre of the Sorrows—Michael Field blends their voices with the voices of women’s history in an act of collaboration fashioned to mirror their own collaborative process.
Though verse drama has been neglected in recent scholarship, this was not the case in 1922, when critic Mary Sturgeon devoted half of her monograph to the couple’s drama. While these dramas might not rank among the best of their works, in them we find striking representations of women speaking from the past for the future—representations foregrounding female collaboration as a conduit for modern sexual and political incarnation. In The Tragic Mary (1890) and Deirdre (1903/1918), the poet-dramatists focus on the possibilities afforded by myth to rewrite sexual women as harbingers of social change. In their collaboration with the historical voices of Mary and Deirdre, Field focuses on the desire between titular characters and the necessity of same-sex communities to imagine a communal space for female desire. In this space, selfhood is imagined as emerging from a blend of dialogic voices, embodied not only in the act of authorial collaboration, but in a transhistorical collaboration between the modern writer and mythic female figures with which that writer is in sympathetic “concord.”
In this paper, I will use Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic “concord." By insisting that sympathy is much more than simply feeling, this presentation will extend our understanding of minds in “concord” to provide a framework for analyzing the process of late-Victorian collaboration.
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Peer Reviewed Articles by Heather Bozant Witcher
In the last years of his life, Dante Gabriel Rossetti provided a bit of advice to Thomas Hall Craine: “Conception, my boy, fundamental brainwork, that is what makes all the difference in art.” Included in this demand for intellectuality in poetry, I argue that Rossetti incorporates the brainwork of community, of deriving creative inspiration from his fraternity. Intellectuality, for Rossetti, is founded on a collaborative sense of creation: the intimacy of shared thought and liberal exchange.
By imagining the lyric’s future in 1870, Rossetti established a way forward for the materiality of poetry through aural and visual rhythm and “culturally resonant form,” as Elizabeth Helsinger has recently argued. By tracing the creative process in the archival drafts of “Eden Bower,” I demonstrate the intellectual ardor and creative exertion contained within each of Rossetti’s poems. I posit that such a process becomes embedded in his prosody (or affective music of verse), particularly, as this article will explore, the rhythm of the refrain ballads in the first part of Poems. In doing so, I suggest that Poems offers a response akin to William Morris’s usage of the performative lyric as a transformation of collective, social fellowship, while providing, also, a framework for defining the lyric potential of Pre-Raphaelite poetics.
It is well recognized that Rossetti sought advice and suggestions from friends and fellow poets at every stage in the creation and publication of Poems. And yet, there has been little attention given to Rossetti’s responses when offered those recommendations. Preserved within the archive, Rossetti’s material response to these suggestions can be witnessed in his revisions to his poetry. By analyzing these drafts alongside the correspondence, I demonstrate the ways in which Rossetti’s lyric form and innovation is indebted to fraternal brainwork. “I hardly ever do produce a sonnet except on some basis of special momentary emotion,” wrote Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Bell Scott on 25 August 1871. “But I think there is another class admissible also—and that is the only other I practice […which is dependent] on a line or two clearly given you, you know not whence, and calling up a sequence of ideas.” As part of his experimental poetics, Rossetti integrates this fraternal exchange of ideas as a way of shaping and reinventing lyric matter.
In her 1947 letters to her psychoanalyst Ruth Foster, Elizabeth Bishop writes that the psychoanalytic process revealed to her that her “fear of repetition” impacted her craft and poetic process: “so far I have regarded every single poem as something absolutely new—I know this can’t quite be true because people have told me I do have a style of my own or a speaking voice of my own or something but I’ve never been able to feel it myself—they all sound quite different to me.” To counteract this desire to make every poem “new,” Bishop ends her intimation to Foster in this opening paragraph with a firmly stated resolution. Rather than “isolated events,” Bishop declares new insight into her poetry as part of a cohesive collection: “I feel that in poetry now there is no reason why I should make such an effort to make each poem an isolated event, that they go on into each other or over lap etc., and are really all one long poem anyway.”
Taking Bishop’s own exploration of her poetry as “really all one long poem” that overlaps or goes “into one another,” this chapter investigates two canonical Bishop poems: “The Armadillo” and “The Moose.” Both focus on the establishment of voice—or, as Bishop points out to Foster—several different sounding voices; however, critical attention has not yet explored how these animal poems—in their manuscript forms—shed light on Bishop’s creative process, with its attention to polyphony and motion. Bishop’s careful craft and fastidious revision have long guided representations of her writing style. However, scholarship has yet to embark on a truly critical analysis of this brilliant perfection. Such an analysis requires an understanding of Bishop’s drafting process as it is revealed in archival materials. Here, I suggest that we can begin to explore the notion of polyphonic blending conveyed by Bishop to Foster with our own form of archival blending: integrating the various textures, materials, and influences upon Bishop’s entire oeuvre, composed of poetry, prose, correspondence, photography, artwork.
In the spirit of genetic criticism, I first provide an analysis of the revisionary processes uncovered in the drafts of “The Armadillo” and “The Moose.” In doing so, this chapter reveals Bishop’s conviction that poetic craft is tied to musical theory. Bishop established such convictions as an undergraduate at Vassar and honed them through epistolary dialogue and poetic experimentation. Juxtaposing Bishop’s poetic process with her interest in music and art illuminates her usage of motion, temporality, and spatiality within poetic form and style. Linking “The Armadillo” with “The Moose” via their emphasis on polyphony and motion—both in content, form, and in the various drafts of the poems—this chapter prompts scholarship to question how Bishop uses various media to think through her poetry. She not only visualizes her poem, crystallizing images in beautiful verse; she hears the poem and explores aspects of motion in her creative process. Indeed, the literal moving around of words, stanzas, and rhythm within the archival pages can be read as a training ground for the polyphonic movement ultimately embedded within the structure and tone of the finalized poems.
Awards by Heather Bozant Witcher
Invited Lecture by Heather Bozant Witcher
Presented July 27, 2016 while in residence in Delaware as the recipient of the 2016 Amy P. Goldman Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies
Conference Presentations (Selected) by Heather Bozant Witcher
Victorian photography is en vogue. Recent London exhibitions have demonstrated the centrality of the technological medium and Victorian usage of the photographic lens. Photography enables a “looking outward” and formulates an artistic and experimental vision of the Victorian world. The National Portrait Gallery’s current Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography is the first exhibition to examine the relationship between photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Lady Clementina Hawarden, and Oscar Rejlander. It showcases how these figures, according to the exhibition catalog, “formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future.” Defying earlier conventions of stiff, dull portraiture, mid-century Victorian photographers turned the medium into an art form. Perhaps this is why prior exhibitions, like the Tate’s Painting with Light (2016), explored the visual connections between photographs and British art movements, including Pre-Raphaelite, aesthetic, and impressionist works. Yet while recent attention has been given to the links between photography and painting, what of the connections between nineteenth-century photography and poetry?
This presentation seeks to illuminate the connections between art photography and Pre-Raphaelite poetry. It draws from the photographic process of Julia Margaret Cameron and her poem “On a Portrait” (1875; 1876) in addition to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s usage of photography as an aid to his art and the revisionary process of his so-called “double works.” I argue that we ought to view literary Pre-Raphaelitism as innovatively experimental, and reliant upon a revived focus on the creative process, revealed in the archive. William Bell Scott’s famous claim that “the seed of the flower of Pre-Raphaelitism was photography,” is often connected to the detail of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Such painting emulates the camera’s perfection, transforming John Everett Millais’ Ophelia into the exact image of Lizzie Siddal drowning. But what could this claim mean for Pre-Raphaelite poetry? I suggest that the photographic medium energized Pre-Raphaelite poetic style by allowing the poet to look and feel outward: to blur the boundaries between the domestic and the foreign in a way that was both defiant and innocuous. As pioneers of experimentalism, known for subversion of form and convention, these artists also play it safe by using the displacement of the photographic lens to depict foreign subjects within a supremely British context.
Turning to the revisionary processes of these Pre-Raphaelite artists, revealed in the archives of the British Library and Victoria & Albert Museum, this presentation will look beyond the traditional literary canon to focus on the “unfinished.” By questioning the definition of a “finished” product, my project establishes the symbiotic relationship among literary drafts, artistic sketches, and finalized art. Investigating the multimodal processes of Cameron and Rossetti as a continual perfection of style and aesthetic perception aligns with a view of literary Pre-Raphaelitism as experimental. I argue for a revived focus on the creative process to show the influences of varied mediums—poetry, painting, photography—upon a single work by contributing to an understanding of the photographic imagination’s centrality to Pre-Raphaelite poetic form.
In 1898, an anonymous contributor to the Daily Chronicle suggested that William Morris had dishonestly failed to acknowledge the role of Robert Catterson-Smith as collaborator of Edward Burne-Jones in the Chaucer. Such accusations brought the legacy of the Kelmscott Press under attack and prompted responses from both Catterson-Smith and Sydney Cockerell, private secretary of the Press and Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. “Fingers, eyes, and sympathy I brought,” wrote Catterson-Smith, “but Sir Edward was responsible for every line and dot in the eighty “Chaucer” drawings which I did under his guidance.”
What, exactly, was Catterson-Smith’s role as collaborator? Examining such a question relies upon the Pre-Raphaelite archive at the Morgan Library. The Morgan’s holdings include a number of Catterson-Smith ephemera and correspondence, including an autographed manuscript in which Catterson-Smith describes his intensive process of translation (MA 8593). Far more importantly, the Morgan holds the aforementioned Chaucer illustrations: 86 platintotype reproductions of Burne-Jones’s drawings, reworked in black and white Chinese ink by Catterson-Smith for the engravers of the woodcuts. In this presentation, I examine the Morgan’s holdings to reproduce the collaborative process between Catterson-Smith and Burne-Jones. This archive preserves the individual stages of what Morris called “sympathetic translation,” and provides significant insight into the creation of what is commonly perceived as a joint project between Burne-Jones and Morris. Probing into the complexity of the Kelmscott collaborations attests to the sociability of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Pre-Raphaelite focus on cooperation and lived communal experience.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s obsessive revisions to his poetry and artwork are well-known to Pre-Raphaelite scholars and offer, at times, an elusive portrayal of his creative process, while providing insight into his conception of the “inner standing-point.” This presentation will examine Pre-Raphaelite processes of revision, preserved in archival materials, in order to explore the symbiotic relationship among literary drafts, artistic sketches, and finalized products.
Investigating the multimodal revisionary processes of the Pre-Raphaelites as a continual perfection of their literary style and aesthetic perceptions aligns with a view of literary Pre-Raphaelitism as innovatively experimental. I argue for a revived focus on the creative process revealed in the archive to show the influences of varied mediums—poetry, painting, photography—upon a single work, and question how this multimodal process forms a cornerstone of Pre-Raphaelite literary style by contributing to an understanding of Rossetti’s “inner standing-point.” This presentation acknowledges the preservation of various mediums at work “often overlapping and contradicting with each other, sometimes within a single figure’s work.” These competing mediums determine and contribute to Pre-Raphaelite form.
Rossetti’s creative impulse is revisionary, often using various mediums to continually refine his sensory perceptions and prosodic technique. Here, I focus on “The Blessed Damozel,” closely reading the evolution of style perfected across drafts and artistic productions. I conclude by placing Rossetti’s style alongside that of his pupil and wife, Lizzie Siddal. Siddal’s archive presents a challenge due to its incompleteness and uncertainty of sequence. Yet, when attempting a definition of Pre-Raphaelitism that expands beyond the famed Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Siddal’s poetic and aesthetic style remains integral to determining the impact of Pre-Raphaelitism upon poetic tradition. Throughout this presentation, I suggest that a reconsideration of Pre-Raphaelite drafting techniques revealed in manuscripts, sketches, and ephemera illuminates the overlapping influences of multiple media as a means of revising and perfecting style.
This presentation will begin with J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin’s definition of remediation to focus on conceptions of digital pedagogy as a form of boundary work. Using student examples in the form of podcasts, infographics, and digital exhibitions (Omeka), I will demonstrate how my college classroom uses digital pedagogy to encourage students to become self-reflexive in their enactment of cognitive and affective experiences, produced by their own compositions. These compositions stretch or cross boundaries through the transparency and/or immediacy that is generated through multimodal composition. Remediation is not a repurposing of one medium in the form of another medium; instead, as Bolter and Grusin argue, remediation is a self-reflexive adoption of one medium by another. As a process, Bolter and Grusin define remediation as “the mediation of mediation;” in other words, “media are continually commenting upon, reproducing and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media.” Indeed, as a process of reform, the explicit goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media. Thus, remediation reinterprets the boundaries between media in a process of transformation, or reformation of reality.
Further, through an analysis of both my students’ compositions and my experience as an instructor in the literature and composition classrooms, my presentation will also look at the limitations of considering multimodal compositions as remediation. Guided by Collin Brooke’s argument that remediation does not quite encompass the ability of new media to invent new forms of mediation, I will demonstrate the implications that this limitation has on my pedagogical practices. For instance, incorporating blogs in the classroom does not exactly constitute a remediation journal. As a whole, this presentation will use student examples as case studies for innovative uses of digital pedagogy in order to demonstrate how remediation traverses boundaries through self-reflexive expressions produced by multimodal compositions conceived as New (re)Media(ation).
The diaries of Michael Field—the collaborative pseudonym used by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper—narrate their participation in social networks comprised of leading figures in the literary and artistic world: John Ruskin, William Butler Yeats, and Walter Pater, to name a select few. In conjunction with this social network is the personal relationship and literary collaboration between the long-term partners. This presentation will demonstrate that collaboration is a means of artistic construction and a lived experience of communal relations.
Here, I argue that in their verse drama, The Tragic Mary (1890)—based on Mary Stuart—I argue that Michael Field experiments with poetic meter to create a social mimesis founded on female community and contagious transference, or sympathetic transport. I will turn to Adam Smith’s understanding of sympathy as a social process—which is dependent upon imaginative transport—in which individuals feel with and for others. This paper will argue that Michael Field creates a formal structure within their drama that mirrors their own collaboration, which is rooted in the social. The ballad, with its contagious meter and rhythm within The Tragic Mary, in particular, enacts an affective communal experience that enables expressions of female desire through the process of sympathetic transport.
Interweaving the couple’s life-writing with their verse drama, my argument will establish a textured understanding of Michael Field’s works by illustrating the collaborative mixture of mediums in both the diaries and the drama. This materiality is essential to understanding the couple’s sympathetic and social collaborative process.
This paper furthers an affective understanding of language and art by assessing the sibling relationship between Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the 1850s/1860s. This presentation reveals for the first time the influence of Victorian liberalism and sympathy that underlies the collaborative ideal shared by the Rossettis. Focusing primarily on the complex genesis of "Goblin Market," and the collision of aesthetic modes therein, collaboration takes on two forms: interpersonal and intertextual. Looking at the intricacy of the Rossetti partnership and using Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic “concord” (an affective communal bond occurring between persons within the same circle and with a shared understanding) illuminates the interlocked system of collaborative connection and identification that frames the siblings’ compositional process as one rooted in a lived communal experience. Ultimately, the Rossettis’ interpersonal relationship, revealed through journals and correspondence, becomes enshrined within the poem’s union of illustration and literature, revealing the possibility of a fleeting moment of interpersonal and intertextual concord.
In the second entry of Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s elopement journals, dated July 29, 1814, Mary makes her first contribution: “Mary was there. S.helley was also with me [.]” Here, Mary asserts her own presence, in her own hand, in the concluding words: “with me.” Inserting herself into the lines of the collaborative travel journal, Mary Shelley makes space for her voice, her words, within the collaboration between the couple.
In the 1814 and 1816 travel journals, a sympathetic collaboration takes place during the couple’s early elopement. Indeed, there is evidence of one individual leaving room within the page for later additions by the second individual. I will use Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic concord to illuminate the interlocked system of collaborative connection and interpersonal identification engaged by the couple in their journals. By emphasizing the collaborative relationship, and the ways in which collaboration lends itself to narrative form in the journals’ publication as History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, this paper will demonstrate that a sympathetic concord, a moral community, happens within the very process of collaboration. Insisting that sympathy is much more than simply feeling, I will extend our understanding of minds in concord to provide a framework for analyzing the process of nineteenth century collaboration.
Examining the interchange of ideas and experiences between Godwin and Shelley, this paper will explore issues of gendered control within the collaborative relationship by noting the change of hands and textual space allotted to both individuals, with particular emphasis on Mary’s position within each entry. Importantly, this paper will argue that the elopement journals create a narrative—both in voice and textual space—that mimics the couple’s own vocal blending, or dialogism, in their collaborative entries, just as it realizes the development of Mary’s own literary voice.
“It was the essence of my undertaking,” wrote William Morris in 1898, “to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type.” With this typographical adventure, I argue that Morris inscribes the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of collaboration into the Kelmscott Press, and into his conception of the ‘ideal book.’ With this inscription, the Kelmscott Press embodies a transhistorical collaboration within its very operation, and exemplifies a lived experience of communal relations with which Morris is in sympathetic ‘concord.’
In this paper, I will use Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic “concord” to illuminate the interlocked system of collaborative connection and circular identification (interpersonal and transhistorical) Morris engages through the Kelmscott Press. By insisting that sympathy is much more than simply feeling, this presentation will extend our understanding of minds in “concord” to provide a framework for classifying the process of collaboration. In the brief history of the Kelmscott Press, we witness sympathetic identification with the revised past in order to imagine the possibility of a fleeting moment of concord.
When, in 1891, Morris developed the Kelmscott Press, he enlarged the classification of book production to incorporate aesthetic and social reform, in part, to redeem late-Victorian society from its mechanical ugliness. Morris emphasized the ornamentation of book production in what appears to be a statement about typography and printing, but is actually a statement of the way in which Morris believed society ought to live. Morris imbues his aesthetic press with the qualities of his ideal society, the qualities of sympathetic collaboration. His idealization of medievalism by replicating the aestheticism of illuminated manuscripts emphasizes not only the collaboration venerated by the Pre-Raphaelites, but demonstrates the transhistorical collaboration between Morris’s press and the medieval past.
The working model of the press not only simulates the collaboration of art and literature in the texts produced, but its very project can be classified as transhistorical collaboration not only blurring time, but emphasizing a collision of aesthetic modes and historic moments. By focusing on the Kelmscott Press itself as a model of collaboration, rather than the specific products produced, we can see collaboration and sympathy built into its very mission.
By questioning the collaboration embodied in the Kelmscott Press, we are able to recognize the difficulty of its categorization. How do we classify a single project composed of disparate artistic endeavors? With the Kelmscott Press, we can analyze not only a blending of aesthetic and historic modes, but we can analyze its mission of bringing together multiple professional classes of people in an interpersonal collaborative effort (printers, engravers, editors, illustrators, and authors). By looking at collaboration holistically, we understand that Morris’s pursuit of Pre-Raphaelitism as a way of life becomes enshrined in the Kelmscott Press.
“Your Queen,” wrote Oscar Wilde to Michael Field in 1890, “is a splendid creature, a live woman to her finger-tips. I feel the warmth of her breath as I listen to her.” When Michael Field turned to writing historical verse drama, they entered that form’s tradition of recuperating for modern sexual politics the legends of mythic women. By re-animating these arcane female histories—including those of Mary Stuart and the Irish figure, Deirdre of the Sorrows—Michael Field blends their voices with the voices of women’s history in an act of collaboration fashioned to mirror their own collaborative process.
Though verse drama has been neglected in recent scholarship, this was not the case in 1922, when critic Mary Sturgeon devoted half of her monograph to the couple’s drama. While these dramas might not rank among the best of their works, in them we find striking representations of women speaking from the past for the future—representations foregrounding female collaboration as a conduit for modern sexual and political incarnation. In The Tragic Mary (1890) and Deirdre (1903/1918), the poet-dramatists focus on the possibilities afforded by myth to rewrite sexual women as harbingers of social change. In their collaboration with the historical voices of Mary and Deirdre, Field focuses on the desire between titular characters and the necessity of same-sex communities to imagine a communal space for female desire. In this space, selfhood is imagined as emerging from a blend of dialogic voices, embodied not only in the act of authorial collaboration, but in a transhistorical collaboration between the modern writer and mythic female figures with which that writer is in sympathetic “concord.”
In this paper, I will use Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic “concord." By insisting that sympathy is much more than simply feeling, this presentation will extend our understanding of minds in “concord” to provide a framework for analyzing the process of late-Victorian collaboration.
In the last years of his life, Dante Gabriel Rossetti provided a bit of advice to Thomas Hall Craine: “Conception, my boy, fundamental brainwork, that is what makes all the difference in art.” Included in this demand for intellectuality in poetry, I argue that Rossetti incorporates the brainwork of community, of deriving creative inspiration from his fraternity. Intellectuality, for Rossetti, is founded on a collaborative sense of creation: the intimacy of shared thought and liberal exchange.
By imagining the lyric’s future in 1870, Rossetti established a way forward for the materiality of poetry through aural and visual rhythm and “culturally resonant form,” as Elizabeth Helsinger has recently argued. By tracing the creative process in the archival drafts of “Eden Bower,” I demonstrate the intellectual ardor and creative exertion contained within each of Rossetti’s poems. I posit that such a process becomes embedded in his prosody (or affective music of verse), particularly, as this article will explore, the rhythm of the refrain ballads in the first part of Poems. In doing so, I suggest that Poems offers a response akin to William Morris’s usage of the performative lyric as a transformation of collective, social fellowship, while providing, also, a framework for defining the lyric potential of Pre-Raphaelite poetics.
It is well recognized that Rossetti sought advice and suggestions from friends and fellow poets at every stage in the creation and publication of Poems. And yet, there has been little attention given to Rossetti’s responses when offered those recommendations. Preserved within the archive, Rossetti’s material response to these suggestions can be witnessed in his revisions to his poetry. By analyzing these drafts alongside the correspondence, I demonstrate the ways in which Rossetti’s lyric form and innovation is indebted to fraternal brainwork. “I hardly ever do produce a sonnet except on some basis of special momentary emotion,” wrote Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Bell Scott on 25 August 1871. “But I think there is another class admissible also—and that is the only other I practice […which is dependent] on a line or two clearly given you, you know not whence, and calling up a sequence of ideas.” As part of his experimental poetics, Rossetti integrates this fraternal exchange of ideas as a way of shaping and reinventing lyric matter.
In her 1947 letters to her psychoanalyst Ruth Foster, Elizabeth Bishop writes that the psychoanalytic process revealed to her that her “fear of repetition” impacted her craft and poetic process: “so far I have regarded every single poem as something absolutely new—I know this can’t quite be true because people have told me I do have a style of my own or a speaking voice of my own or something but I’ve never been able to feel it myself—they all sound quite different to me.” To counteract this desire to make every poem “new,” Bishop ends her intimation to Foster in this opening paragraph with a firmly stated resolution. Rather than “isolated events,” Bishop declares new insight into her poetry as part of a cohesive collection: “I feel that in poetry now there is no reason why I should make such an effort to make each poem an isolated event, that they go on into each other or over lap etc., and are really all one long poem anyway.”
Taking Bishop’s own exploration of her poetry as “really all one long poem” that overlaps or goes “into one another,” this chapter investigates two canonical Bishop poems: “The Armadillo” and “The Moose.” Both focus on the establishment of voice—or, as Bishop points out to Foster—several different sounding voices; however, critical attention has not yet explored how these animal poems—in their manuscript forms—shed light on Bishop’s creative process, with its attention to polyphony and motion. Bishop’s careful craft and fastidious revision have long guided representations of her writing style. However, scholarship has yet to embark on a truly critical analysis of this brilliant perfection. Such an analysis requires an understanding of Bishop’s drafting process as it is revealed in archival materials. Here, I suggest that we can begin to explore the notion of polyphonic blending conveyed by Bishop to Foster with our own form of archival blending: integrating the various textures, materials, and influences upon Bishop’s entire oeuvre, composed of poetry, prose, correspondence, photography, artwork.
In the spirit of genetic criticism, I first provide an analysis of the revisionary processes uncovered in the drafts of “The Armadillo” and “The Moose.” In doing so, this chapter reveals Bishop’s conviction that poetic craft is tied to musical theory. Bishop established such convictions as an undergraduate at Vassar and honed them through epistolary dialogue and poetic experimentation. Juxtaposing Bishop’s poetic process with her interest in music and art illuminates her usage of motion, temporality, and spatiality within poetic form and style. Linking “The Armadillo” with “The Moose” via their emphasis on polyphony and motion—both in content, form, and in the various drafts of the poems—this chapter prompts scholarship to question how Bishop uses various media to think through her poetry. She not only visualizes her poem, crystallizing images in beautiful verse; she hears the poem and explores aspects of motion in her creative process. Indeed, the literal moving around of words, stanzas, and rhythm within the archival pages can be read as a training ground for the polyphonic movement ultimately embedded within the structure and tone of the finalized poems.
Presented July 27, 2016 while in residence in Delaware as the recipient of the 2016 Amy P. Goldman Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies
Victorian photography is en vogue. Recent London exhibitions have demonstrated the centrality of the technological medium and Victorian usage of the photographic lens. Photography enables a “looking outward” and formulates an artistic and experimental vision of the Victorian world. The National Portrait Gallery’s current Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography is the first exhibition to examine the relationship between photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Lady Clementina Hawarden, and Oscar Rejlander. It showcases how these figures, according to the exhibition catalog, “formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future.” Defying earlier conventions of stiff, dull portraiture, mid-century Victorian photographers turned the medium into an art form. Perhaps this is why prior exhibitions, like the Tate’s Painting with Light (2016), explored the visual connections between photographs and British art movements, including Pre-Raphaelite, aesthetic, and impressionist works. Yet while recent attention has been given to the links between photography and painting, what of the connections between nineteenth-century photography and poetry?
This presentation seeks to illuminate the connections between art photography and Pre-Raphaelite poetry. It draws from the photographic process of Julia Margaret Cameron and her poem “On a Portrait” (1875; 1876) in addition to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s usage of photography as an aid to his art and the revisionary process of his so-called “double works.” I argue that we ought to view literary Pre-Raphaelitism as innovatively experimental, and reliant upon a revived focus on the creative process, revealed in the archive. William Bell Scott’s famous claim that “the seed of the flower of Pre-Raphaelitism was photography,” is often connected to the detail of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Such painting emulates the camera’s perfection, transforming John Everett Millais’ Ophelia into the exact image of Lizzie Siddal drowning. But what could this claim mean for Pre-Raphaelite poetry? I suggest that the photographic medium energized Pre-Raphaelite poetic style by allowing the poet to look and feel outward: to blur the boundaries between the domestic and the foreign in a way that was both defiant and innocuous. As pioneers of experimentalism, known for subversion of form and convention, these artists also play it safe by using the displacement of the photographic lens to depict foreign subjects within a supremely British context.
Turning to the revisionary processes of these Pre-Raphaelite artists, revealed in the archives of the British Library and Victoria & Albert Museum, this presentation will look beyond the traditional literary canon to focus on the “unfinished.” By questioning the definition of a “finished” product, my project establishes the symbiotic relationship among literary drafts, artistic sketches, and finalized art. Investigating the multimodal processes of Cameron and Rossetti as a continual perfection of style and aesthetic perception aligns with a view of literary Pre-Raphaelitism as experimental. I argue for a revived focus on the creative process to show the influences of varied mediums—poetry, painting, photography—upon a single work by contributing to an understanding of the photographic imagination’s centrality to Pre-Raphaelite poetic form.
In 1898, an anonymous contributor to the Daily Chronicle suggested that William Morris had dishonestly failed to acknowledge the role of Robert Catterson-Smith as collaborator of Edward Burne-Jones in the Chaucer. Such accusations brought the legacy of the Kelmscott Press under attack and prompted responses from both Catterson-Smith and Sydney Cockerell, private secretary of the Press and Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. “Fingers, eyes, and sympathy I brought,” wrote Catterson-Smith, “but Sir Edward was responsible for every line and dot in the eighty “Chaucer” drawings which I did under his guidance.”
What, exactly, was Catterson-Smith’s role as collaborator? Examining such a question relies upon the Pre-Raphaelite archive at the Morgan Library. The Morgan’s holdings include a number of Catterson-Smith ephemera and correspondence, including an autographed manuscript in which Catterson-Smith describes his intensive process of translation (MA 8593). Far more importantly, the Morgan holds the aforementioned Chaucer illustrations: 86 platintotype reproductions of Burne-Jones’s drawings, reworked in black and white Chinese ink by Catterson-Smith for the engravers of the woodcuts. In this presentation, I examine the Morgan’s holdings to reproduce the collaborative process between Catterson-Smith and Burne-Jones. This archive preserves the individual stages of what Morris called “sympathetic translation,” and provides significant insight into the creation of what is commonly perceived as a joint project between Burne-Jones and Morris. Probing into the complexity of the Kelmscott collaborations attests to the sociability of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Pre-Raphaelite focus on cooperation and lived communal experience.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s obsessive revisions to his poetry and artwork are well-known to Pre-Raphaelite scholars and offer, at times, an elusive portrayal of his creative process, while providing insight into his conception of the “inner standing-point.” This presentation will examine Pre-Raphaelite processes of revision, preserved in archival materials, in order to explore the symbiotic relationship among literary drafts, artistic sketches, and finalized products.
Investigating the multimodal revisionary processes of the Pre-Raphaelites as a continual perfection of their literary style and aesthetic perceptions aligns with a view of literary Pre-Raphaelitism as innovatively experimental. I argue for a revived focus on the creative process revealed in the archive to show the influences of varied mediums—poetry, painting, photography—upon a single work, and question how this multimodal process forms a cornerstone of Pre-Raphaelite literary style by contributing to an understanding of Rossetti’s “inner standing-point.” This presentation acknowledges the preservation of various mediums at work “often overlapping and contradicting with each other, sometimes within a single figure’s work.” These competing mediums determine and contribute to Pre-Raphaelite form.
Rossetti’s creative impulse is revisionary, often using various mediums to continually refine his sensory perceptions and prosodic technique. Here, I focus on “The Blessed Damozel,” closely reading the evolution of style perfected across drafts and artistic productions. I conclude by placing Rossetti’s style alongside that of his pupil and wife, Lizzie Siddal. Siddal’s archive presents a challenge due to its incompleteness and uncertainty of sequence. Yet, when attempting a definition of Pre-Raphaelitism that expands beyond the famed Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Siddal’s poetic and aesthetic style remains integral to determining the impact of Pre-Raphaelitism upon poetic tradition. Throughout this presentation, I suggest that a reconsideration of Pre-Raphaelite drafting techniques revealed in manuscripts, sketches, and ephemera illuminates the overlapping influences of multiple media as a means of revising and perfecting style.
This presentation will begin with J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin’s definition of remediation to focus on conceptions of digital pedagogy as a form of boundary work. Using student examples in the form of podcasts, infographics, and digital exhibitions (Omeka), I will demonstrate how my college classroom uses digital pedagogy to encourage students to become self-reflexive in their enactment of cognitive and affective experiences, produced by their own compositions. These compositions stretch or cross boundaries through the transparency and/or immediacy that is generated through multimodal composition. Remediation is not a repurposing of one medium in the form of another medium; instead, as Bolter and Grusin argue, remediation is a self-reflexive adoption of one medium by another. As a process, Bolter and Grusin define remediation as “the mediation of mediation;” in other words, “media are continually commenting upon, reproducing and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media.” Indeed, as a process of reform, the explicit goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media. Thus, remediation reinterprets the boundaries between media in a process of transformation, or reformation of reality.
Further, through an analysis of both my students’ compositions and my experience as an instructor in the literature and composition classrooms, my presentation will also look at the limitations of considering multimodal compositions as remediation. Guided by Collin Brooke’s argument that remediation does not quite encompass the ability of new media to invent new forms of mediation, I will demonstrate the implications that this limitation has on my pedagogical practices. For instance, incorporating blogs in the classroom does not exactly constitute a remediation journal. As a whole, this presentation will use student examples as case studies for innovative uses of digital pedagogy in order to demonstrate how remediation traverses boundaries through self-reflexive expressions produced by multimodal compositions conceived as New (re)Media(ation).
The diaries of Michael Field—the collaborative pseudonym used by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper—narrate their participation in social networks comprised of leading figures in the literary and artistic world: John Ruskin, William Butler Yeats, and Walter Pater, to name a select few. In conjunction with this social network is the personal relationship and literary collaboration between the long-term partners. This presentation will demonstrate that collaboration is a means of artistic construction and a lived experience of communal relations.
Here, I argue that in their verse drama, The Tragic Mary (1890)—based on Mary Stuart—I argue that Michael Field experiments with poetic meter to create a social mimesis founded on female community and contagious transference, or sympathetic transport. I will turn to Adam Smith’s understanding of sympathy as a social process—which is dependent upon imaginative transport—in which individuals feel with and for others. This paper will argue that Michael Field creates a formal structure within their drama that mirrors their own collaboration, which is rooted in the social. The ballad, with its contagious meter and rhythm within The Tragic Mary, in particular, enacts an affective communal experience that enables expressions of female desire through the process of sympathetic transport.
Interweaving the couple’s life-writing with their verse drama, my argument will establish a textured understanding of Michael Field’s works by illustrating the collaborative mixture of mediums in both the diaries and the drama. This materiality is essential to understanding the couple’s sympathetic and social collaborative process.
This paper furthers an affective understanding of language and art by assessing the sibling relationship between Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the 1850s/1860s. This presentation reveals for the first time the influence of Victorian liberalism and sympathy that underlies the collaborative ideal shared by the Rossettis. Focusing primarily on the complex genesis of "Goblin Market," and the collision of aesthetic modes therein, collaboration takes on two forms: interpersonal and intertextual. Looking at the intricacy of the Rossetti partnership and using Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic “concord” (an affective communal bond occurring between persons within the same circle and with a shared understanding) illuminates the interlocked system of collaborative connection and identification that frames the siblings’ compositional process as one rooted in a lived communal experience. Ultimately, the Rossettis’ interpersonal relationship, revealed through journals and correspondence, becomes enshrined within the poem’s union of illustration and literature, revealing the possibility of a fleeting moment of interpersonal and intertextual concord.
In the second entry of Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s elopement journals, dated July 29, 1814, Mary makes her first contribution: “Mary was there. S.helley was also with me [.]” Here, Mary asserts her own presence, in her own hand, in the concluding words: “with me.” Inserting herself into the lines of the collaborative travel journal, Mary Shelley makes space for her voice, her words, within the collaboration between the couple.
In the 1814 and 1816 travel journals, a sympathetic collaboration takes place during the couple’s early elopement. Indeed, there is evidence of one individual leaving room within the page for later additions by the second individual. I will use Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic concord to illuminate the interlocked system of collaborative connection and interpersonal identification engaged by the couple in their journals. By emphasizing the collaborative relationship, and the ways in which collaboration lends itself to narrative form in the journals’ publication as History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, this paper will demonstrate that a sympathetic concord, a moral community, happens within the very process of collaboration. Insisting that sympathy is much more than simply feeling, I will extend our understanding of minds in concord to provide a framework for analyzing the process of nineteenth century collaboration.
Examining the interchange of ideas and experiences between Godwin and Shelley, this paper will explore issues of gendered control within the collaborative relationship by noting the change of hands and textual space allotted to both individuals, with particular emphasis on Mary’s position within each entry. Importantly, this paper will argue that the elopement journals create a narrative—both in voice and textual space—that mimics the couple’s own vocal blending, or dialogism, in their collaborative entries, just as it realizes the development of Mary’s own literary voice.
“It was the essence of my undertaking,” wrote William Morris in 1898, “to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type.” With this typographical adventure, I argue that Morris inscribes the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of collaboration into the Kelmscott Press, and into his conception of the ‘ideal book.’ With this inscription, the Kelmscott Press embodies a transhistorical collaboration within its very operation, and exemplifies a lived experience of communal relations with which Morris is in sympathetic ‘concord.’
In this paper, I will use Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic “concord” to illuminate the interlocked system of collaborative connection and circular identification (interpersonal and transhistorical) Morris engages through the Kelmscott Press. By insisting that sympathy is much more than simply feeling, this presentation will extend our understanding of minds in “concord” to provide a framework for classifying the process of collaboration. In the brief history of the Kelmscott Press, we witness sympathetic identification with the revised past in order to imagine the possibility of a fleeting moment of concord.
When, in 1891, Morris developed the Kelmscott Press, he enlarged the classification of book production to incorporate aesthetic and social reform, in part, to redeem late-Victorian society from its mechanical ugliness. Morris emphasized the ornamentation of book production in what appears to be a statement about typography and printing, but is actually a statement of the way in which Morris believed society ought to live. Morris imbues his aesthetic press with the qualities of his ideal society, the qualities of sympathetic collaboration. His idealization of medievalism by replicating the aestheticism of illuminated manuscripts emphasizes not only the collaboration venerated by the Pre-Raphaelites, but demonstrates the transhistorical collaboration between Morris’s press and the medieval past.
The working model of the press not only simulates the collaboration of art and literature in the texts produced, but its very project can be classified as transhistorical collaboration not only blurring time, but emphasizing a collision of aesthetic modes and historic moments. By focusing on the Kelmscott Press itself as a model of collaboration, rather than the specific products produced, we can see collaboration and sympathy built into its very mission.
By questioning the collaboration embodied in the Kelmscott Press, we are able to recognize the difficulty of its categorization. How do we classify a single project composed of disparate artistic endeavors? With the Kelmscott Press, we can analyze not only a blending of aesthetic and historic modes, but we can analyze its mission of bringing together multiple professional classes of people in an interpersonal collaborative effort (printers, engravers, editors, illustrators, and authors). By looking at collaboration holistically, we understand that Morris’s pursuit of Pre-Raphaelitism as a way of life becomes enshrined in the Kelmscott Press.
“Your Queen,” wrote Oscar Wilde to Michael Field in 1890, “is a splendid creature, a live woman to her finger-tips. I feel the warmth of her breath as I listen to her.” When Michael Field turned to writing historical verse drama, they entered that form’s tradition of recuperating for modern sexual politics the legends of mythic women. By re-animating these arcane female histories—including those of Mary Stuart and the Irish figure, Deirdre of the Sorrows—Michael Field blends their voices with the voices of women’s history in an act of collaboration fashioned to mirror their own collaborative process.
Though verse drama has been neglected in recent scholarship, this was not the case in 1922, when critic Mary Sturgeon devoted half of her monograph to the couple’s drama. While these dramas might not rank among the best of their works, in them we find striking representations of women speaking from the past for the future—representations foregrounding female collaboration as a conduit for modern sexual and political incarnation. In The Tragic Mary (1890) and Deirdre (1903/1918), the poet-dramatists focus on the possibilities afforded by myth to rewrite sexual women as harbingers of social change. In their collaboration with the historical voices of Mary and Deirdre, Field focuses on the desire between titular characters and the necessity of same-sex communities to imagine a communal space for female desire. In this space, selfhood is imagined as emerging from a blend of dialogic voices, embodied not only in the act of authorial collaboration, but in a transhistorical collaboration between the modern writer and mythic female figures with which that writer is in sympathetic “concord.”
In this paper, I will use Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic “concord." By insisting that sympathy is much more than simply feeling, this presentation will extend our understanding of minds in “concord” to provide a framework for analyzing the process of late-Victorian collaboration.
J.M. Synge visited the Aran Islands in 1898 and immersed himself among its inhabitants, searching for a means of freeing Ireland from colonial servitude. What he found was the keen. In this ritualized lament for the dead, Synge found an ideal vocalization of the past-in-present—one that he turned to again and again in his writing to illuminate the contradictory experience of fin-de-siècle modernity. In his Deirdre of the Sorrows (1907-1909), the Irish keen links an antiquarian, folkloric past with a thwarted modernity. Deirdre mourns for the dead and for an alluring life she cannot fully grasp: one outside of societal conventions. This paper explores the keen’s centrality to modern Irish writing, and demonstrates that late-Victorian and early 20th century representations of the Irish lament embody a central principle of Paterian aestheticism: the expansion of the solitary moment of sensory experience.
Looking at the keen formally and affectively in culminating moments of female monologue in Deirdre of the Sorrows, Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1892), and James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1904), I argue that the keen is a convention used to elongate the moment of lament into an affective experience for the audience. Deirdre, Salome, and Gretta expend themselves in these monologues, establishing the keen as a culturally specific traditional performance repurposed as excess. As their keen lingers, the audience anticipates an escape from restrictive gender and sexual roles. Thus, this utterance expands the moment beyond the text and realizes Walter Pater’s “gem-like flame,” solidifying and lengthening the ‘excessive’ experience. As a representation of female creation, keening points to the formal influence of Pater’s conception of pure individual moments on modernist narrative form. Following Pater’s recommendation of “maintaining this ecstasy” in its ability to expand the sensory moment, the keen is a formal construction used to make an argument about sensory experience.
So, for example, let us say that domestic violence is a social justice issue that concerns you. Perhaps you're a Women's and Gender Studies major/minor, a criminal justice major, or a pre-legal studies major with an academic interest in the law as it relates to gender and minorities. Or perhaps you're simply a concerned student who wants to promote safety for women or men experiencing abuse. If you were to pursue that idea, you would choose a service learning site from our course's pre-approved list that relates to domestic violence and serves victims of abuse, and you would complete five major rhetorical stages of developing the project, which include 1) developing a statement of purpose for your project, 2) researching your project, 3) arguing (with yourself, mostly) about it, and then 4) preparing a video based on your service learning experience and 5) a written research proposal advocating your position. You will be working on your own project throughout the semester, and all of your assignments will be geared toward that project. By the end of the course, you'll be able to craft persuasive messages that will allow you to intervene in that situation.