XIIIThe Nineteenth Century: The Victorian Period

Tate GP, Dubois M (2012). XIII The Nineteenth Century: The Victorian Period Victorian Poetry. The Year's Work in English Studies 91:770-788 http://ywes.oxfordjournals.org/content/90/1/687 XIII The Nineteenth Century: The Victorian Period - Victorian Poetry. Gregory Tate and Martin Dubois In this section, Martin Dubois reviews publications on Arnold, Hopkins, the Rossettis, women poets, working-class poets, poetry from 1830 to 1880, and work by Gregory Tate. Gregory Tate reviews publications on the Brownings, Michael Field, Swinburne, and Tennyson, poetry from 1880-1900, and work by Martin Dubois. Linda K. Hughes’s The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry offers vivid proof of how comprehensively the study of Victorian poetry has altered in recent decades. It goes without saying that the dominance of the ‘big four’—Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and Hopkins—no longer holds; more striking, perhaps, is the way that Hughes’s book reveals how substantially the expansion of the Victorian poetry canon has changed our notion of Victorian poetry’s significance within the life of its period. No longer is Victorian poetry thought to be pressed to the cultural margins by virtue respectively of its intense lyricism and the ascendancy of the novel. Rather, it is in dynamic interaction with a diverse array of scientific, religious, social and political formations. Hughes concentrates on mass print culture as the means by which poetry reached (and was shaped by) a large reading public. What is most to be valued in her approach is that this focus goes alongside—indeed, is complemented by—a scrupulously close attention to literary form and style. The opening chapter of Hughes’s deals expressly with formal experimentation, considering the dramatic monologue and hybrid forms which combine dramatic, narrative and lyric, before turning to uses of rhythm and rhyme, language, and image and symbol. Chapter Two discusses the influence of classical and European forms on Victorian poetry. Hughes then turns to print culture, examining the impact of periodical publication on poetry (a mixed blessing, she finds), as well as the mutually transforming encounter between poetry and fiction in the period. Further chapters are focused thematically, considering poetry’s relation to science and technology, to religion, to sentiment, sympathy and domesticity, to imperialism, and to various kinds of social and political liberty. There is also a chapter devoted to aestheticism. The book closes with two chapters of close reading, offering interpretations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, and poems by Ernest Dowson and Thomas Hardy respectively. In surveys of this kind there are inevitably gaps —William Barnes’s continuing obscurity receives emphatic confirmation by his absence from the volume—but Hughes has succeeded in providing an introduction to the subject that manages to be impressively wideranging in scope as well as concisely and lucidly written. Two special issues of Victorian Poetry appeared in 2010. The first examined the materiality of Victorian poetic texts, a topic Lorraine Janzen Kooistra in her introductory essay ‘From Blake to Beardsley: “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry”’ (VP 48[2010] 1-9) suggests has been much neglected by critics. In his contribution to the special issue, ‘Literature by Design Since 1790’ (VP 48[2010] 11-40), Jerome McGann ranges widely among the writings and publications of Blake, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, D.G. Rossetti, and others, highlighting the significance of design to their poetic achievement. By contrast Linda K. Hughes’s ‘Inventing Poetry and Pictorialism in Once a Week: A Magazine of Visual Effects’ (VP 48[2010] 41-72) gives attention to a specific instance of the interrelation of poetry and print culture, arguing that the pairing of poems with illustrations in the periodical Once a Week acted to counterbalance strong aesthetic or ideological commitments, thus allowing the magazine to appeal to broad and diverse readership. In ‘Palms and Temples: Edward Lear’s Topographies’ (VP 48[2010] 73-94), Richard Maxwell notices how Lear’s landscape illustrations of Tennyson’s poems, as well as his own illustrated travel journals, show divergent strands to his creative thought, encompassing both documentary and visionary perspectives. The fraught relationship between poetry and illustration in an 1895 anthology edited by W.E. Henley is the subject of Nicholas Frankel’s ‘Embodying the City in A London Garland’ (VP 48[2010] 95-136). Frankel finds that Henley’s own doubts about the value of the work of his illustrators relates to the way this undermines the self-sufficiency of either poem or picture in A London Garland. Finally, Johanna Drucker’s ‘La Petit Journal des Refusées: A Graphical Reading’ (VP 48[2010] 13769) enlists an unusual illustrated periodical of 1896 in reflecting on the limitations of cultural frames such as the avant-garde. The final issue of Victorian Poetry in 2010 focused on the Victorian sonnet. The introductory piece by Marianne Van Remoortel and Marysa Demoor, ‘Of Sonnets and Other Monuments: Picturing Sonnets of the Nineteenth Century (VP 48[2010] 451-9), examines recent trends in sonnet criticism, emphasising the focus on visuality which is conspicuous throughout the issue. This concern with the visual is evident in Isobel Armstrong’s piece on ‘D. G. Rossetti and Christina Rossetti as Sonnet Writers’ (VP 48[2010] 461-73). Armstrong links the siblings’ sonnets to Victorian theories and technologies of photography, both in their preoccupation with constructing images and in their representation of those images as physical and tactile things. In ‘Sonnet—Image—Intertext: Reading Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Found’ (VP 48[2010] 475-88), Brian Donnelly argues that the Petrarchan sonnets which D. G. Rossetti wrote to accompany these paintings are not simply interpretive keys to his pictures. Instead, Donnelly persuasively suggests, sonnet form enables Rossetti to realize the latent narrative temporality of his paintings. Rhian Williams’s essay ‘“Pyramids of Egypt”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and a Victorian Turn to Obscurity’ (VP 48[2010] 489-508) presents Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a test-case for Victorian attitudes toward the sonnet form. Tracing the reception history of Shakespeare’s sequence across the Victorian period, Williams identifies a shift from autobiographical readings, which focus on ‘historically specific circumstances’, to interpretations that emphasize the ‘timeless universality’ of the sonnets’ lyricism (p. 490). Valentine Cunningham considers the sonnets of Tennyson’s brother in ‘Charles (Tennyson) Turner and the Power of the Small Poetic Thing’ (VP 48[2010] 509-21). Turner uses the sonnet form, Cunningham argues, to encapsulate the potential energy of small things, a strategy which Cunningham traces in the sonneteer’s appreciations of little children, his ekphrastic descriptions of art objects, and his celebrations of English imperialism. Two essays from the Victorian Poetry special issue on the sonnet concentrate on Modern Love. In ‘Darwinism, Feminism, and the Sonnet Sequence: Meredith’s Modern Love’ (VP 48[2010] 523-38), John Holmes argues that Meredith’s sequence, for all its cynicism, deploys Darwinian models of evolution to gesture towards a progressive reconfiguration of gender relations in which ‘men and women are implicated in questions of sexual morality on equal terms’ (p. 536). In ‘Modern Love and the Sonetto Caudato: Comedic Intervention through the Satiric Sonnet Form’ (VP 48[2010] 539-57), Kenneth Crowell identifies the sixteen-line poems of Modern Love as developments of the sonetto caudato form practised by Michelangelo and Milton. Crowell opines that Meredith employs the satiric conventions associated with this form to mock Victorian social mores. Anne Nichols’s ‘Glorification of the Lowly in Felicia Hemans’ Sonnets “Female Characters of Scripture”’ (VP 48[2010] 55975) undertakes a comprehensive survey of Hemans’s 1834 sonnet sequence, analysing the imagery and phrasing that recur throughout the sonnets and arguing that the sequence reveals Hemans as ‘a spokesperson for her culture’s ambivalence’ about female agency and domesticity (p. 574). In ‘“Thy woman’s hair, my sister, all unshorn”: EBB’s Sonnets to George Sand’ (VP 48[2010] 577-93), Amy Billone offers two complementary readings of EBB’s sonnets to George Sand, suggesting that the imagery of the poems sets up seemingly insurmountable gender restrictions while also presenting Sand as a writer who succeeds in transcending these obstacles. Clinton Machann’s Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading identifies itself as a work of literary Darwinism, interested in the biological and genetically determined aspects of what Machann consistently calls ‘human nature’. Yet the book is at its most interesting when it attends to the culturally specific contexts of Victorian poets’ representations of masculinity. Of these, Machann suggests, the most important was the tension, within nineteenth-century constructions of manhood, between the competing demands of domesticity and aggression. Machann’s introductory first chapter gives a survey of recent scholarship on Victorian long poems, Victorian gender studies and literary Darwinism. Following this, the second chapter of his book reads the strangely marginal figure of King Arthur in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King as an embodiment of the conflicting impulses that underpinned Victorian conceptions of masculinity. Chapter 3, focusing on EBB’s Aurora Leigh, argues that, by the end of the poem, Aurora and Romney Leigh succeed in overcoming the restrictions of Victorian gender ideology, both participating in a ‘“poetic” vision of the world’ which is ‘fully androgynous’ (p. 66). Chapter 4 is concerned with Arthur Hugh Clough’s epistolary poem Amours de Voyage, but it returns to the issues raised in the Tennyson chapter. Machann identifies the ‘ambivalent manhood’ (p. 106) of Clough’s protagonist Claude as representative of the seemingly irresolvable tensions implicit in Victorian masculinity. In chapter 5, Machann considers how Robert Browning strives to resolve those tensions in The Ring and the Book, encapsulating the negative aspects of manhood in the character of Guido, whose malignity is vanquished by the union of positive masculinity with femininity represented by Caponsacchi and Pompilia. The concluding sixth chapter summarizes the comparisons that Machann draws between the four poets’ representations of masculinity, before reiterating his commitment to a Darwinist interpretation of their work. There are several pieces on Victorian poetry in Discourses of Mobility—Mobility of Discourse: The Conceptualization of Trains, Cars and Planes in Nineteenth and TwentiethCentury Poetry, edited by Peter Wenzel and Sven Strasen. Most of these comprise short close readings which examine the metaphors and imagery of specific poems. Wenzel’s ‘The Fiery Monster as an Incarnation of Danger and Deceit: Two Broadside Ballads from the Early Days of the Railway (ca. 1840)’ claims that the depiction of locomotives as monstrous in popular ballads reflects wider anxieties about the new technology, and Monique Sontag’s ‘Beyond the Peak of the “Railway Mania”: Nostalgia and Reconsideration of a Former Utopia in Charles Mackay’s “The Stage Coach and the Steam Carriage” (1856)’ analyses the nostalgia for older forms of transport articulated in Mackay’s sonnet. Aljoscha Merk considers another popular Victorian poet in ‘“Titan train” with “demon light”: On the Ambivalent Relation between Nature and Culture in James Macfarlan’s “The Midnight Train” (1859)’, arguing that Macfarlan’s railway poem both invokes and interrogates the conceptual opposition between nature and culture. In ‘Diving through Rock and Hill: The Machine as the Slave of Man in W. Cosmo Monkhouse’s “The Night Express” (1865)’, Timo Lothmann studies the Victorian fascination with the railway through a reading of a poem that has a train as its firstperson speaker. Antje Schumacher, in ‘A Reply to William Wordsworth’s Railway Sonnets? J. K. Stephen’s “Poetic Lamentation on the Insufficiency of Steam Locomotion in the Lake District” (1882)’, argues that Stephen’s poem employs a mock-Wordsworthian style to present an essentially Wordsworthian critique of the damage inflicted on the countryside by technological expansion. Finally, another contribution by Wenzel, ‘“Seventy-five […] superb fellow-creatures in her pipes and her cylinders”: W. E. Henley’s A Song of Speed (1903), a Eulogy to an Early Mercedes’, suggests that Henley’s poem represents an early example of the eroticization of the car that would become an entrenched aspect of twentieth-century motoring culture. Two pieces on Victorian poetry appear in the first volume of Exploring Space: Spatial Notions in Cultural, Literary and Language Studies, edited by Andrzej Ciuk and Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska. In ‘Camelot—A Vision of an Absolute Reality in Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King’, Ewa Młynarczyk maps the symbolic spatial arrangements of Tennyson’s Camelot, arguing that the city constitutes an ‘irruption of the absolute into the transitory world’ (p. 263). Katarzyna Winiarska’s ‘Spatial Metaphors on Man-God Relationship in the Chosen Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ examines the vertical and horizontal spatial metaphors used by Hopkins to represent the relation between the poet and God. Other general studies on Victorian poetry published in 2010 include Sarah Heinz’s contribution to Stefan Horlacher, Stefan Glomb and Lars Heiler’s edited collection Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, ‘The Age of Transition as an Age of Transgression? Victorian Poetry and the Taboo of Sexuality, Love, and the Body’ (pp. 159-76). Heinz contends that Victorian poets including Patmore, Tennyson, Browning and Meredith do not only transgress taboos, but also enlist poetry as a means of exploring the purpose and nature of moral boundaries generally. Adela Pinch’s ambitiously wide-ranging Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing contains much that will interest students of Victorian poetry. A chapter on thinking in the second person in nineteenth-century poetry turns upon the prevalence of versions of the phrase ‘I am thinking of you’ in the work of poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Letitia Landon, Alice Meynell and Christina Rossetti. Another chapter gives consideration to the kind of thinking about other people which happens in the poetry of George Meredith and Coventry Patmore, proposing that ‘both The Angel in the House and Modern Love crucially separate thinking about another person from knowing him or her’ (p. 113). Pinch’s study impressively draws together close formal (especially prosodic) analysis with stimulating philosophical reflection. The Cambridge History of English Poetry, edited by Michael O’Neill, includes a number of useful surveys of Victorian poets as well as an introduction to the period as a whole contributed by Richard Cronin (pp. 576-96). There are strong essays on Tennyson and on the Brownings from Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (pp. 596-616) and Herbert F. Tucker (pp. 617-34) respectively. Michael O’Neill’s coupling of Emily Brontë with Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough (pp. 635-48) is one of a number of essays to offer striking juxtapositions between poets. Discussing late Victorian voices, Nicholas Shrimpton (pp. 686-705) and Francis O’Gorman (pp. 706-24) range widely between poets, with Shrimpton stressing the lyric originality of Decadent verse, and O’Gorman attending to the dramatic qualities of the verse of Davidson, Kipling, Michael Field, Lee-Hamilton, Kendall and Webster. The pairings of Christina Rossetti with Hopkins in Catherine Phillips’s essay (pp. 669-85), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti with Swinburne in David G. Riede’s essay (pp. 659-68), are no less valuable for being more obvious: both essays offer sprightly introductions to their poets. In one of the few articles to appear on Matthew Arnold this year, Nils Clausson in ‘Pastoral Elegy into Romantic Lyric: Generic Transformation in Matthew Arnold’s “Thrysis”’ (VP 48[2010] 173-94) questions the familiar categorisation of Arnold’s ‘Thrysis’ as a pastoral elegy, proposing instead that it combines elegy with romantic lyric. The poem, Clausson argues, wrestles with the difficulty of giving modern shape and direction to a traditional poetic genre. Anthony Kearney explores the conflicting motivations behind George Saintsbury’s influential appraisal of Arnold’s poetry in ‘Laying Claim: George Saintsbury’s Assessment of Matthew Arnold’ (VP 48[2010] 327-40). 2010 saw the appearance of the first volume of the new Journal of Browning Studies, published by the Browning Society. The journal commenced with two pieces surveying recent work on the Brownings. In ‘Re-Reading EBB: Trends in Elizabeth Barrett Browning Criticism’ (JBrowS 1[2010] 5-13), Simon Avery presents a detailed chronology of critical studies and editions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work, starting with Cora Kaplan’s 1978 edition of Aurora Leigh and ending by looking forward to the 2010 Complete Works (see below). Britta Martens contributes ‘A Survey of Work on Robert Browning 1996-2009’ (JBrowS 1[2010] 14-21), in which she celebrates the work of large-scale editorial projects while lamenting the relative lack of comparably weighty monographs on Browning’s poetry. Other contributions adopt a range of approaches in their readings of the two poets’ work. Sara Malton’s ‘“He told me what he would not tell”: Confessional Poetics and the NineteenthCentury Dramatic Monologue’ (JBrowS 1[2010] 22-36) mixes historicism with formalism, interpreting Browning’s ‘The Confessional’ and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘A Last Confession’ as examples of Victorian anti-Catholicism and, more interestingly, as selfconscious considerations of the formal similarities between the ritual of confession and the dramatic monologue. Katerine Gaja begins her piece on ‘The Brownings at Vallombrosa: Landscape and Language’ (JBrowS 1[2010] 37-48) by detailing EBB’s passionate but ambivalent responses to the monastery of Vallombrosa, before incorporating EBB’s comments on the silence of the surrounding landscape into a thoughtful discussion of the Brownings’ views on the limitations of language. In ‘“Keeping up the Fire”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Victorian Versification’ (JBrowS 1[2010] 49-69), Robert Stark presents a detailed analysis of EBB’s prosody in Aurora Leigh, arguing persuasively that her manipulation of blank verse makes an important contribution to the poem’s handling of questions of gender and the social role of the poet. Simonetta Berbeglia, in ‘A Skeleton in the Wall: Robert Browning’s Italian Story’ (JBrowS 1[2010] 70-79), investigates the background of an anecdote which Browning recounted in 1874. Berbeglia’s detective work yields three possible dates for the events of the story, in which Browning claimed to have seen a skeleton buried into the wall of a church in Arezzo, and to have written a poem about it. Joseph Phelan’s piece ‘From the Archive: Robert Browning and the Newspapers’ (JBrowS 1[2010] 88-95) unearths some of Browning’s anonymous letters and contributions to Victorian newspapers, which cover subjects including his publication of poems in periodicals, his responses to comments about EBB and, curiously, his indirect involvement in the pirated publication of Tennyson’s ‘The Lover’s Tale’. Two new volumes of The Brownings’ Correspondence, edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis and Edward Hagan, were also published in 2010. Volume 17, covering the months between February 1851 and January 1852, finds the Brownings leaving Florence to spend time in London and in Paris, where, in December 1851, they witness Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état. The future Napoleon III was one of the few things which the Brownings firmly disagreed about, and EBB’s letters of December 1851 already express her ‘artistical admiration’ for Louis Napoleon (p. 187). The correspondence in this volume also discusses the developing personality of the two-year-old Pen Browning, and the controversy that met the publication of EBB’s Casa Guidi Windows in May 1851. Volume 18, which includes letters written between February 1852 and March 1853, shows both poets committing themselves to new and large-scale projects, as Robert Browning begins writing verses that will become Men and Women (1855), and EBB commences work in earnest on Aurora Leigh (1856). This volume also records the beginnings of another dispute between the Brownings, centring on EBB’s newfound enthusiasm for, and Robert’s suspicion towards, spiritualism. The design, organisation and overall quality of the two volumes meet the high standards set by earlier instalments in this series; the detailed annotations and the appendixes containing biographical sketches of the Brownings’ friends and contemporary reviews of their work make these volumes an invaluable resource for Browning scholars. The most important publication for Browning studies, and for the study of Victorian poetry more broadly, was The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Sandra Donaldson with Rita Patteson, Marjorie Stone and Beverley Taylor. Incredibly, these five volumes constitute the first ever scholarly edition of EBB’s complete works, and as such they fill a major gap in the textual resources available to scholars of Victorian poetry. Instead of proceeding chronologically, the volumes of the edition are divided between different publications. Volumes 1 and 2 contain the 1856 fourth edition of EBB’s Poems (first published in 1844), while volume 3 is taken up by Aurora Leigh. The fourth volume features those poems from EBB’s juvenilia and early publications that were not republished in the 1844 Poems, along with the prose works that appeared as The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (1863). The final volume consists of the posthumous Last Poems (1862), alongside a significant amount of unpublished writing. Although this arrangement seems somewhat unusual, it has its own logic, as it distinguishes poems which EBB chose to publish and revise throughout her career from the early writings which she decided not to republish and from work which did not appear until after her death. In all five volumes the text of EBB’s work is presented in a well-annotated, but still readable, format. The editorial introductions to EBB’s shorter poems are rather brief and sometimes sketchy, but the introductions for more substantial works, particularly Aurora Leigh, are thorough and illuminating. The edition is a triumph in its comprehensiveness and in the detailed textual information it provides about the whole range of EBB’s writing, and it promises to have a profound influence on future work on this poet and on Victorian poetry in general. Robert Browning: Selected Poems, edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan, draws on the three published volumes of the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Browning’s work, as well as including some poems from Dramatis Personae, as yet unpublished in the multi-volume edition. This single-volume selection focuses, sensibly and unsurprisingly, on Browning’s most popular works, the shorter lyrics and dramatics monologues that appeared between 1842 and 1864. As a consequence of this policy, it omits longer poems such as Paracelsus and Sordello, although the editors find room both for Pauline and for Pippa Passes. While the majority of the poems that appear here have been included in other recent selections, the quality and extent of the annotations and the textual and contextual information in this volume elevate it above most other selected editions. The editors have also managed to include some invaluable appendixes, including Browning’s 1852 ‘Essay on Shelley’ and the 1855 letter to John Ruskin which offers the most concise account of Browning’s conception of poetry. Although the volume is physically bulky and a little cumbersome, the clarity of its layout and the high standard of the editorial contributions make it a pleasure to read, and this selection should prove equally useful to scholars, students and general readers. Articles on EBB were relatively thin on the ground in 2010. She is one of the writers discussed in ‘The Sexual Politics of Translating Prometheus Unbound’ (CulC 74[2010] 16480) by Yopie Prins. Comparing EBB’s rendering of Aeschylus to later translations by Janet Case and Edith Hamilton, Prins argues convincingly that, for these writers, the act of translation was ‘a performance of subjection as well as mastery’ over the conventionally male realm of classical learning (p. 166). In ‘“A Little Taller than Homer”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Hector in the Garden”’ (Cithara 48:ii[2009] 28-33), missed last year, Lauren P. Matz reads EBB’s poem as a meditation on mythologies of rebirth and renewal and as a feminist rejection of the authority of EBB’s father and of Homer as literary ‘father’. Essays on Robert Browning were more numerous. H. Wendell Howard presents a vehement but onesided argument on ‘Browning, Blougram, and Belief’ (Logos 13[2010] 79-93), taking issue with critics who read Bishop Blougram as a hypocrite and asserting that this dramatic speaker faithfully articulates Browning’s own ideas about religious belief. Despite its unhelpfully knotty style, Jonathan Loesberg’s essay on ‘Browning Believing: “A Death in the Desert” and the Status of Belief’ (VLC 38[2010] 209-38) is a more satisfying analysis of Browning’s views on belief. ‘A Death in the Desert’, Loesberg argues, presents a positive account of willed belief, in which religious faith is founded not on epistemological certitude but on chosen conviction. Another dense essay on Browning, Tyler Efird’s ‘“Anamorphosizing” Male Sexual Fantasy in Browning’s Monologue’ (Mosaic 43[2010] 151-66), is equally rewarding. Efird builds on previous Lacanian readings of Browning to argue that the Lacanian conception of the gaze sheds important light on Browning’s construction of his speakers’ (and readers’) subjectivities in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’. In ‘Was the Duke of Ferrara Impotent?’ (ANQ 23[2010] 166-71), Kevin J. Gardner seeks to answer his question in the affirmative, arguing (with mixed results) that the imagery and language used by the speaker of ‘My Last Duchess’ reveal his sexual impotence. In ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner in Browning, Sillitoe, and Murakami’ (EIC 60[2010] 129-47), Helen Small uses Browning’s verse as the starting-point for a knowledgeable examination of the literary and political significance of the figure of the runner, taking in the debates about civic responsibility in Browning’s ‘Pheidippides’ (1879), the class concerns of Alan Sillitoe and the apolitical individualism of Haruki Murakami. Jo Carruthers’s ‘Writing, Interpretation, and the Book of Esther: A Detour via Browning and Derrida’ (YES 39[2009] 58-71) was missed last year. In a fascinating argument founded on allusions to the Book of Esther in Browning’s The Ring and the Book and Derrida’s ‘Envois’, Carruthers traces the ways in which Esther’s preoccupation with issues of textuality, reading and writing influences Browning’s epic and Derrida’s deconstruction. Another 2009 essay, June Sturrock’s ‘How Browning and Byatt Bring Back the Dead: “Mr Sludge, ‘the Medium’” and “The Conjugial Angel”’ (PAns 7[2009] 19-30), compares Browning’s poem to Byatt’s short story about the Tennysons. Sturrock argues that, while Byatt uses the figure of the medium to represent the artist as communicator, ‘Browning is more concerned with the representational artist’s anxiety about the uneasy relation between fact and fiction’ (p. 25). Derrida and Sludge both feature in a book that was missed last year, J. Hillis Miller’s The Medium is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies (2009). Miller incorporates a reading of the Victorian dramatic monologue into his free-wheeling reflections on contemporary ‘telepathic’ technologies. Innovations such as email and the internet are telepathic, Miller suggests, because they enable the transference of thoughts and ideas at a distance. Miller connects his analysis of these technologies to writings about spiritualism and telepathy by Browning, Freud and Derrida, suggesting that, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, mediums and media play a similarly active role in shaping the meanings that they transmit. Focusing on ‘Mr Sludge, “the Medium”’, Miller argues that, despite Browning’s vocal suspicion of spiritualism, the dramatic monologue form replicates and enacts the ventriloquist performances of mediums like Sludge: in the monologue, the poet ‘can become a medium through which the other speaks’ (p. 34). Miller also traces similar dramatic or telepathic strategies in Freud’s essays on telepathy and, at length, in Derrida’s ‘Telepathy’. Although Miller’s discussion of Browning reads rather like an introduction to his meditations on Freud and Derrida, this book is nonetheless an original and stimulating consideration of the links between Victorian poetics and contemporary media. Suzanne Bailey’s Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry is a thought-provoking and impeccably well-researched monograph that offers new perspectives on the representation of psychology, cognition and thought in Browning’s verse. Bailey draws on twentieth and twenty-first century models of cognitive science to suggest that the digressive structures and compacted language of Browning’s writing, and his conception of thought as something rapid and mutable, were shaped by his personal ‘cognitive style’. In a reinvigorating approach to author-centred criticism, she argues that this ‘feature of [Browning’s] style’ is also ‘a characteristic of his mind’ (p. 66). The first four chapters of the book concentrate on Browning’s life outside his poetry. Using impressively detailed close readings of letters and anecdotes, Bailey tentatively diagnoses Browning, and other members of his family, with the condition now known as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (it is a testament to Bailey’s skills as a reader of Browning and as a writer that this argument is on the whole convincing). The remaining five chapters examine the ideas about speech patterns, perception and thought that emerge from Browning’s verse. Bailey’s coverage in these chapters is admirably inclusive, taking in work from across Browning’s career, and she devotes significant space to early poems such as Sordello and to neglected late works such as Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day. While this broad focus means that Bailey rarely undertakes sustained analyses of specific poems, her book presents a confident and valuable synthesis of Browning’s writing about the mind. Several important books on Hopkins appeared in 2010. Angus Easson’s Gerard Manley Hopkins forms part of Routledge’s Guides to Literature Series, and seeks to offer an introduction to Hopkins’s poems as well as an overview of the contextual and critical material which surrounds them. Hopkins, Easson acknowledges in his introduction, is ‘a demanding poet’ (p. 1), and navigating one’s way through the mass of competing inspirations and influences that have been proposed for his work is a demanding task. It is fortunate, then, that Easson is an astute and lively guide, judicious in his selections of both texts and contexts on which to focus. The first part of the book offers a careful rendition of the major events of Hopkins’s life, paying particular attention to the religious and aesthetic ideas the poet held and encountered. In the next section, Easson makes his way chronologically through Hopkins’s poetry, both early and mature, as well as providing brief reflections on Hopkins’s journals and letters. The final section offers a remarkably concise and clear-sighted introduction to Hopkins criticism, all the way from its early, Leavisite roots, to recent studies of Hopkins’s visual interests and his homoeroticism. Overall, Easson’s book can fairly claim to be the best general introduction to Hopkins currently in print. In Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination, John Parham seeks to demonstrate that Hopkins ‘arrived at an ontological framework equivalent to that posited by an impending ecological science’ (p. 104). His study joins theoretical discussion of ecocriticism with a detailed account of Hopkins’s work and thought. It also traces the genealogy and character of what its author terms ‘Victorian ecology’. Parham sees ecology and theology as complementing each other in Hopkins’s writing, even if he occasionally voices a preference for those poems in which the former concern predominates. A chapter on Hopkins’s ‘pragmatic’ (p. 210) attitude to poetry proposes that his art is essentially one of protest, protest which significantly is both social and ecological. Parham also acknowledges, however, that Hopkins’s deep-rooted political conservatism, as well as the priority he accorded to the human over the non-human, places some distance between the stance of the Victorian poet and that of the contemporary ecology movement. Parham can occasionally sound a little finicky in argument (Hopkins’s death from typhoid is observed to be ‘the result of urban environmental hazard’ [p. 12]; ‘Pied Beauty’ is designated ‘an anticipation of biodiversity’ [p. 53]), but his book shows a wide engagement with Hopkins criticism and offers a cogent reading of Hopkins from an ecocritical perspective. In Reading the Underthought: Jewish Hermeneutics and the Christian Poetry of Hopkins and Eliot, Kinereth Meyer and Rachel Salmon Deshen offer readings of Hopkins and T.S. Eliot from the perspective of the rabbinic interpretative tradition. Chapter One describes the genesis of their project, setting it against the background of Hopkins and Eliot criticism, and providing an introduction to Jewish hermeneutics. The second chapter turns in more detail to classical Jewish hermeneutics, contrasting interpretative practices in the Jewish rabbinic and Christian patristic periods. Part Two of the book focuses on Hopkins. In Chapter Three Meyer and Salmon Deshen analyse two Hopkins poems, ‘The Windhover’ and ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’, giving particular attention to language and sound. In the following chapter they offer a ‘catachrestic’ interpretation of The Wreck of the Deutschland, attempting to comprehend what this insistently Christian poem offers the Jewish reader. They find that utterance in the poem (Hopkins’s, the tall nun’s) ‘catachrestically fits no one thing properly’ (p. 138), opening a variety of meanings that can be appreciated by the non-Christian reader. The fifth chapter (and the final one on Hopkins) attempts to offer a different perspective to biographical readings of Hopkins’s sonnets by focusing attention on their performative function for both reader and writer. An afterword follows three chapters on T.S. Eliot. Here the authors offer further reflections on the innovative approach taken in their study. This year’s most important article on Hopkins is Simon Humphries’s ‘Hopkins’s Silent Men’ (ELH 77[2010] 447-76), a challenging account of the silence kept by the men and boys of Hopkins’s poems. Given that verbal eloquence in Hopkins’s spiritual writing is often taken to be a Christ-like quality, Humphries finds the active quieting of men and boys in Hopkins’s poems disturbing. He observes that this may rebound upon the transgressive or subversive aspects to Hopkins’s fascination with the male body. Jiong Liu’s ‘Catholic Predilections in the Poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Seamus Heaney’ (ReAr 14[2010] 167-296) considers how the shared religious heritage of Hopkins and Heaney finds reflection in their work. Liu argues that it can be traced in the interest taken by both poets in sensuous, tactile language, but that the dialogic emphasis of Hopkins’s poetry is not replicated in Heaney’s verse. This year’s Hopkins Quarterly (37[2010]) is taken up with the publication of Humphry House’s study of the poet’s early years. House’s biography lay unfinished at the time of his death in 1955, but now appears in print for the first time, edited by Lesley Higgins. In ‘The Month as Hopkins Knew It’ (VPR 43[2010] 296-308), Martin Dubois presents an analysis of the theological preoccupations of the Catholic journal which declined to print ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. The Month, Dubois suggests, may have shared some of Hopkins’s ultramontane views, making its rejection of his poem less of an inevitability than other scholars have argued. It is rare nowadays to find Hopkins treated as a modernist poet, but Finn Fordham writes perceptively about issues of revision and completion from this perspective in a chapter of his I Do, I Undo, I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves. Fordham notices how little Hopkins was inclined to complete or resolve his poems, arguing that this was less a casualty of the rigours of Hopkins’s professional life than a true reflection of the ‘settled indecision’ (p. 104) which characterises his writing. 2010 saw the publication of a major new collection of essays on Amy Levy, Amy Levy: Critical Essays, edited by Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman. The editorial introduction offers an account of Levy’s changing critical fortunes, and proposes a number of different contexts for understanding her work: as Jewish novelist, as new woman, and as urban writer. In her contribution, Elizabeth F. Evans considers Levy’s The Romance of a Shop in the context of the increasing prominence of professional, middle-class women in the urban environment towards the end of the nineteenth century. Emma Francis’s essay is an important corrective to the notion that Levy shared the socialist politics adhered to by many of her closest friends. Francis contrasts Levy’s work with the complex representation of working-class subjectivity found in the writing of her friend, Clementina Black. Levy’s pessimism and her preoccupation with exclusion and unfitness is the subject of Gail Cunningham’s chapter. Cunningham finds this emphasis characteristic of fin de siècle feminist discourse. In her contribution Nadia Valman argues that the critique of Anglo-Jewry found in Levy’s Reuben Sachs forms part of a broader Victorian tradition of polemical attacks on Judaism from a gendered perspective. T.D. Olverson in her chapter places Levy in a different tradition, that of Victorian Hellenism, in which classical learning functioned ‘as a sophisticated form of feminist protest’ (p. 112). Levy’s representation of Jewish figures of excessive display provides the focus for Susan David Bernstein’s chapter. Alex Goody’s chapter analyses liminal space in Levy’s late poetry through the idea of ‘passing’, a concept Goody finds expressive of the unfixed identity of urban women in Levy’s work. Levy’s influence on Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto is considered by Naomi Hetherington in her contribution to the volume. Lyssa Randolph in her essay describes how the deaths of Amy Levy and Constance Naden were interpreted within socio-scientific discourses of the late nineteenth century. These linked female creativity and suicide. Meri-Jane Rochelson’s afterword discusses the increasing attention given to Levy’s work within the broader context of Victorian studies. Aside from Hetherington and Valman’s collection on Levy, a number of publications on Victorian women poets appeared in 2010. In ‘“Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!”: Boundaries and Thresholds in Mary Coleridge’s Poetry’ (VP 48[2010] 195218), Kasey Bass Baker enlists archival research in offering a new interpretation of Mary E. Coleridge’s poem ‘The Witch’, proposing that it offers a complex revisioning of elements in Coleridge’s own personal experience. Gregory Tate’s contribution to Ryan Barnett and Serena Trowbridge’s edited collection Acts of Memory: The Victorians and Beyond, ‘“My Present Past”: Memory and Identity in the Poetry of George Eliot’ (pp. 73-84), investigates the apparent contrast between the realism of Eliot’s prose and the more idealist approach to psychology shown in her poetry. Tate complicates this difference, finding that the poetry actually moves between materialist and idealist notions of memory, so that it mediates between the conception of the ‘soul’ as a transcendent entity and the ‘mind’ as mutable and contingent. Richard Dellamora’s ‘Greek Desire and Modern Sexualities’, an essay taking in Michael Field and C. P. Cavafy, appears in Imagination and Logos: Essays on C. P. Cavafy, edited by Panagiotis Roilos. Dellamora argues that both Field and Cavafy participate in a ‘historicist cosmopolitanism’ (p. 140), a sexual and aesthetic project that draws on Hellenic culture in order to construct a more expansive conception of poetic practice and identity. One monograph substantially concerned with Christina Rossetti’s poetry appeared in 2010. Anne Jamison’s ambitious study Poetics en Passant: Redefining the Relationship between Victorian and Modern Poetry aims to challenge traditional period boundaries as well as divisions between French and British nineteenth-century poetry. Jamison argues that the subjects of her study, Rossetti and Charles Baudelaire, expose the problems with the labels ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modern’. Their writing shares a transgressive quality that Jamison sees as expressive of ‘emergent modern values’ (p. 6). Chapter One is concerned with Baudelaire’s prose poems, seeing them as radically unstable forms, especially in relation to prosody. The second chapter turns to consider the relation of Baudelaire’s prose poems to his journalism. Chapter Three tries to imagine a ‘Victorian Baudelaire’, especially within the context of French interest in British culture in the mid-nineteenth century. The second half of Jamison’s study turns to Rossetti’s poetry. Chapter Four considers the transgressive potential of Rossetti’s verse in relation to the concern of Victorian women’s poetry with the dead. In what is perhaps the most persuasive part of her book, Jamison then moves in Chapter Five to discuss the innovative metre used in Rossetti’s Goblin Market, identifying it as an element of what she sees as Rossetti’s transgressive poetics. Chapter Six mirrors the earlier chapter on the ‘Victorian Baudelaire’ by trying to conceive of a ‘Modernist Rossetti’. A coda offers an intriguing reflection on the challenge of writing the book—as well as the challenge its writing presents to more traditional critical approaches to both Victorian and Modern poetry. A wide range of articles appeared on Christina Rossetti this year. Heather McAlpine considers physicality in ‘Goblin Market’ in ‘“Would Not Open Lip from Lip”: Sacred Orality and the Christian Grotesque in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”’ (VR 36[2010] 114-28), paying particular attention to the status of the mouth in the poem. She argues that the corporeal aspects of Rossetti’s spirituality, though rarely observed, are crucial to understanding the poem’s religious impulse. In ‘The Price of Redemption in “Goblin Market”’ (SEL 50[2010] 853-75), Jill Rappoport seeks to highlight the importance of sisterhood to the economies of desire found in Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’, making a connection with the alternative structures of economic exchange to be found in Victorian Anglican sisterhoods. Peter Robinson takes Rossetti’s ‘Promises Like Pie-Crust’ as the starting point for a discussion of the nature of promising in poetry in ‘Christina Rossetti’s “Promises”’ (EIC 60[2010] 148-67), observing that while Rossetti’s poem appears mostly to be concerned with the refusal of a promise—the rejection of a marriage proposal—it fulfils expectations of a different kind in the way in which it is configured formally. The influence of Tractarianism on Rossetti has received much critical notice of late. Andrew D. Armond in ‘Limited Knowledge and the Tractarian Doctrine of Reserve in Christina Rossetti’s The Face of the Deep’ (VP 48[2010] 219-41) takes this work in a different direction by arguing that Rossetti’s devotional prose as much as her poetry is indebted to Tractarian ideas and beliefs. In ‘The House of Christina Rossetti: Domestic and Poetic Spaces’ (JPRS 19[2010] 31-54), Diane D’Amico offers a detailed description of the London house where Rossetti spent the final two decades of her life. She also attempts to recover a sense of how this domestic space might find reflection in Rossetti’s poetry. In ‘Christina Rossetti’s “Wounded Speech”’ (L&T 24[2010] 345-59), Joel Westerholm asserts that Rossetti’s poems are prayer-like and that their familiar air of disappointment and dissatisfaction has more to do with what Westerholm terms ‘woundedness’ (p. 353) than with inexplicitness or reticence. Esther T. Hu’s contribution to Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R. Szabo and Jens Zimmerman’s edited collection Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory is a chapter entitled ‘Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Tractarian Suffering’ (pp. 155-168). Hu attempts to counter feminist readings of suffering in Rossetti’s verse by arguing that this emphasis needs to be understood within the context of Tractarian discourses on the necessity of suffering for Christian life. William Baker records details of a copy of Rossetti’s Verses Dedicated to Her Mother which encloses an unpublished Rossetti letter in ‘Christina Rossetti: An Unpublished Letter and an Unrecorded Copy of Verses’ (N&Q 57[2010] 221-23). Anna Despotopoulou’s ‘Nowhere or Somewhere? (Dis)Locating Gender and Class Boundaries in Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses’ (RES 61[2010] 414-34) is concerned with Rossetti’s little-known narrative for children, Speaking Likenesses, but also will also be of interest to readers of her poetry for the light it sheds on Rossetti’s attitude to fairy-tales and fantasy. Melanie Hanson’s contribution to Christa Mahalik’s edited collection Merchants, Barons, Sellers and Suits: The Changing Images of the Businessmen through Literature, ‘The Consumed Consumer:Business as Usual for Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Men”’(pp. 57-94), envisages Laura’s fate in Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ as echoing that of Victorian bankruptcy, setting the poem within a wider tradition of Victorian writing which focuses on financial ruin. In addition to those mentioned above, one further article on the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti appeared in 2010. In ‘Work, Lack, and Longing: Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel” and the Working Men’s College’ (VS 52[2010] 219-48), Kristin Mahoney argues that the revisions Rossetti made to his poem ‘The Blessed Damozel’ during a period teaching at the Working Men’s College show a developing awareness of the connection between unfulfilled desire and artistic labour. She writes interestingly about the influence on Rossetti of Ruskin’s teaching on artistic perception at the College. The most noteworthy publication on Swinburne in 2010 was A. C. Swinburne and the Singing Word: New Perspectives on the Mature Work, edited by Yisrael Levin. Levin’s Introduction, which sets out the case for the intellectual and aesthetic interest of Swinburne’s late work through a reading of his 1894 poem ‘The Palace of Pan’, is followed by Stephanie Kuduk Weiner’s suggestive essay on ‘Knowledge and Sense Experience in Swinburne’s Late Poetry’. Kuduk Weiner argues that, both through his descriptions of nature and through his experiments with sound, Swinburne fashions an empiricist poetics in which knowledge and poetic meaning are shaped by sensory data. In ‘“Quivering Web of Living Thought”: Conceptual Networks in Swinburne’s Songs of the Springtides’, John A. Walsh gives an informative account of the way in which his online resource The Swinburne Project uses web-based encoding to fashion a searchable digital text and to analyse and classify the patterns of imagery which recur throughout this volume of Swinburne’s verse. A second contribution by Levin, ‘Solar Erotica: Swinburne’s Myth of Creation’, argues that Swinburne, in poems such as ‘Off Shore’ and ‘By the North Sea’, constructs a creation narrative which is founded on the erotic interplay of the elemental forces of sun, sea, earth and wind, and in which ‘nature itself functions as both creator and the thing created’ (p. 70). Focusing on Swinburne’s border ballads, Brian Burton’s ‘Swinburne and the North’ shows convincingly how Swinburne manipulated the dialect and folklore of Northumbria, and his own Northumbrian family heritage, to fashion an account of a pagan and republican northern England, in opposition to the mainstream literary and political culture of the south. In ‘Swinburne’s Shakespeare: The Verbal Whirlwind?’, Nick Freeman presents a convincing case for Swinburne’s contribution as a Shakespearean critic, arguing that ‘the radical aesthetic and political agenda’ (p. 96) of the poet’s 1880 Study of Shakespeare was one of several competing strands of nineteenth-century criticism that went on to influence subsequent scholarship on Shakespeare. Charlotte Ribeyrol’s ‘A Channel Passage: Swinburne and France’ returns to the much-discussed topic of Swinburne’s engagement with French literature, undertaking a comprehensive survey of the writers who inspired Swinburne and of his own influence on a later generation of French poets. Catherine Maxwell contributes an essay on ‘Swinburne’s Friendships with Women Writers’. Maxwell modestly characterizes her piece as ‘an overview’ and ‘a starting place’ for further research (p. 128), but it is a clearly delineated and carefully surveyed starting place, which presents valuable information about Swinburne’s relationships with writers ranging from Christina Rossetti to the novelist Eliza Lynn Linton. Rikky Rooksby’s ‘Selecting Swinburne’ looks at selected editions of Swinburne’s writing from 1887 to 2004. Rooksby suggests that selections of Swinburne throughout the twentieth century had to contend with T. S. Eliot’s negative assessment of the poet, and he maps the trend by which editors shifted their focus away from Swinburne’s early poetry and paid more attention to the later verse. Finally, in his Afterword to the volume, David G. Riede makes an impassioned case both for Swinburne’s verse and for the ongoing vitality of Swinburne studies, pointing out that historicist and poststructuralist approaches in particular have the potential to give new insights into the intellectual, linguistic and technical complexities of Swinburne’s poetry. Elsewhere, in ‘Between the Medusan and the Pygmalian: Swinburne and Sculpture’ (VLC 38[2010] 21-37), Lene Østermark-Johansen examines Swinburne’s reactions to two sculptures: the Hermaphrodite and Michelangelo’s La Notte. Swinburne, ØstermarkJohansen argues, viewed these hybrid and controversial figures as emblematic of his own artistic practice, of ‘aesthetic writing as a hybrid art form’ (p. 22). Swinburne’s views on Shakespeare are (briefly) discussed by Jonathan Bate in ‘Shakespeare in the Twilight of Romanticism: Wagner, Swinburne, Pater’ (ShJE 146[2010] 11-25). Focusing on the three men’s readings of Measure for Measure, Bate locates Wagner, Swinburne and Pater within ‘the Romantic tradition of Shakespearean interpretation’ founded by Goethe (p. 11). Several essays on Swinburne and Tennyson feature in 2010’s Yearbook of English Studies, which focuses on the arts in Victorian literature. In his piece on ‘Swinburne’s Galleries’ (YES 40[2010] 160-79), Stefano Evangelista considers how Swinburne uses his subjective responses to art exhibitions as the basis for his synaesthetic writing about visual art in his poems and critical essays. In ‘Song’s Fictions’ (YES 40[2010] 141-59), Elizabeth Helsinger interrogates the commonplace nineteenth-century link between music and lyric poetry by studying the songs which Swinburne and Tennyson insert into their long poems. The poets’ songs, Helsinger suggests, ‘retain singing as poetry’s horizon of aspiration’ (p. 149) while also dramatising the formal and social powers of song, which separate it from poetry. In ‘Display Time: Art, Disgust, and the Returns of the Crystal Palace’ (YES 40[2010] 33-60), Jonah Siegel argues that Tennyson’s ‘The Palace of Art’ anticipates concerns, about the purpose of art exhibitions and about the characteristically repetitive experience of modernity, that were debated, by Ruskin among others, during the reconstruction of the Crystal Palace in the 1850s. The primary aim of The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Tennyson, edited by Valerie Purton and Norman Page, seems to be to provide detailed factual information about the poet and his writings to students and readers, and this is both its strength and its weakness. The dictionary is thorough, covering every significant aspect of Tennyson’s life and work, and the entries are judiciously cross-referenced, but there is some repetition of material. A more serious problem for an introductory volume of this kind is the number of typing or printing errors which result in factual mistakes. For example, the dictionary states at one point that Maud was published in 1854 rather than 1855 (p. 157), and it implies that the Royal Society was founded in the sixteenth rather than the seventeenth century (p. 230). The emphasis on facts also means that some entries, such as those on Tennyson’s relations to other poets, lack critical penetration and consequently feel somewhat flat. On the other hand, the entries on Tennyson’s acquaintances and contemporaries are often enlivened by fresh and illuminating anecdotes, and the volume features some perceptive summaries of general topics such as ‘biography’ and ‘science’. The best entries in the volume are probably those grouped under Tennyson’s name. These offer useful introductions to Tennyson’s family life, methods of composition, political views and poetic development, as well as, perhaps most helpfully, a historical survey of different critical and theoretical approaches to the poet’s work. Martin Blocksidge’s ‘A Life Lived Quickly’: Tennyson’s Friend Arthur Hallam and his Legend is a comprehensive study of Arthur Henry Hallam’s life and writing, and as such will be greeted with enthusiasm by Tennyson scholars. Blocksidge’s biography provides a wealth of contextual detail about a number of issues which touched Hallam’s life: the day-today running of Eton College and of Trinity College, Cambridge, for example, and the rules and conventions that governed British tourism in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. It also presents some astute assessments of Hallam’s poetry. Its greatest virtue, however, is its success in bringing together and synthesizing a vast range of facts, records and anecdotes about Hallam that were previously only available in the footnotes of editions of In Memoriam and in other disparate sources. The first three chapters, in which Blocksidge examines Hallam’s family antecedents, his relationship with his father, the Whig historian Henry Hallam, and his travels in Italy as a teenager, are probably the most original. In subsequent chapters, as Hallam arrives in Cambridge and meets Alfred Tennyson, the narrative becomes more familiar. It might perhaps be argued that this biography has little new to say about Hallam’s relationship with Tennyson, but that is not the purpose of the book. While he devotes a thoughtful final chapter to Hallam’s posthumous ‘transfiguration’ in In Memoriam, it seems that Blocksidge is trying, to some extent, to rescue Hallam from Tennyson’s elegy and to approach him as a person with a life and relationships beyond his association with the poet (the book is particularly good on the dynamics of Hallam’s Eton friendship with Gladstone). In this Blocksidge succeeds admirably, presenting a convincing account of Hallam as an intriguing figure in his own right. The 2010 number of the Tennyson Research Bulletin opens with ‘Tennyson’s Hum’ by Angela Leighton (TRB 9[2010] 315-29), a skilful and nuanced essay that uses the theories of poetic sound put forward by Martin Heidegger and Wallace Stevens to inform a sensitive reading (or hearing) of Tennyson’s early poem ‘The Lover’s Tale’. John Holmes’s ‘The Ionian Father: Tennyson and Homer’ (TRB 9[2010] 330-47) is an equally impressive contribution. Holmes argues convincingly that Tennyson’s love of Homer was bound up with his commitment to Romanticism, and that ‘Homer’s epics gave Tennyson an imaginative realm in which he could experiment with Romantic poetry’ (p. 340). In ‘“The Kraken”, Aunt Bourne, and the End of the World’ (TRB 9[2010] 348-55), Julia Courtney links the apocalyptic imagery of Tennyson’s short poem to the Calvinist eschatology espoused by the poet’s aunt Mary Bourne. Clara Dawson, in ‘“A Tale of Little Meaning”: The Mind’s Ear in Tennyson’s Early Poetry’ (TRB 9[2010] 356-63), joins Leighton in attending to the sounds of Tennyson’s verse. His early writing, Dawson suggests, is preoccupied with ‘sounds and noises which only the poet or speaker can hear’ (p. 357), and these sounds raise anxieties about the response of audiences for and within Tennyson’s poetry. Jim Cheshire gives an illuminating insight into the challenges of curatorial work in his note on ‘Curating Tennyson for the Bicentenary: Some Reflections on “Tennyson Transformed”’ (TRB 9[2010] 364-75), in which he recounts the planning and development of his 2009 exhibition of Tennysonrelated art. In ‘Tennyson’s Beginnings’ (EIC 60[2010] 1-25), Robert Douglas-Fairhurst uses a succession of subtle close readings of Tennyson’s verse to explore the poet’s ambivalence toward beginnings. Douglas-Fairhurst makes a convincing case that this ambivalence, compounded of Tennyson’s hopes for progress and his fear of failure or collapse, is central to his poetics. Francis O’Gorman asks ‘What is Haunting Tennyson’s Maud (1855)?’ (VP 48[2010] 293-311). The answer, O’Gorman suggests, is In Memoriam: he argues that the two poems address similar issues, about the relation between the living and the dead, from different angles. Maud, for O’Gorman, is a sceptical rewriting of the elegy, ‘plac[ing] a question mark over the assumptions and emotional resolutions of In Memoriam’ (p. 304). Devon Fisher’s impressive article on ‘The Becoming Character of Tennyson’s Simeon Stylites’ (VP 48[2010] 313-26) positions this dramatic monologue within the context of nineteenth-century hagiographic writing. Fisher comments that the poem’s exploration of the communal construction of a saint’s identity ‘poses one of the consuming questions of Tennyson’s career: how does the life of the individual attain meaning in a public setting?’ (p. 322). John Morton asks a similar question of Tennyson himself in ‘Tennyson at 200: The Bicentenary of the Victorian Laureate’ (LitComp 7[2010] 876-82). Reviewing a range of responses to the bicentenary of Tennyson’s birth in 2009, from conferences and special issues of journals to essay collections and novels that take the poet as their subject, Morton concludes that Tennyson retains a visible presence in contemporary literary culture. Andrew Lynch’s essay ‘“…if indeed I go”: Arthur’s Uncertain End in Malory and Tennyson’ (ArthL 27[2010] 19-31) argues that Tennyson follows Malory in fashioning an ambiguous account of Arthur’s (possible) death, one which offers ‘telling resistance to medieval’ (and Victorian) ‘notions of a “good death” for the king’ (p. 31). Tennyson’s debts to another precursor are examined by Parvin Loloi in ‘Hafiz and the Language of Love in Nineteenth-Century English and American Poetry’, published in Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry, edited by Leonard Lewisohn. Loloi traces the influence of Hafiz’s poetry, as mediated through the ‘Persian Song’ of Sir William Jones and the Westöstlicher Divan of Goethe, on Byron, Shelley, Emerson and Tennyson. Nicolas Barker’s article in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘Friends of Your Book: Notes on Tennyson Reading Maud’ (TLS [11 June 2010] 15-17), reproduces some unpublished notes about Tennyson’s reading of his favourite performance piece, recorded by the clergyman and literary critic Alfred Gatty and his wife, the children’s author Margaret Gatty. Jason Camlot’s short essay on ‘Alfred Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854)’ (VR 35:i[2009] 27-32) in a series entitled ‘Keynotes: Key Victorian Texts’ was missed last year. Camlot offers a compressed but rewarding account of the poem’s critical history, placing the insistent orality of Tennyson’s verse in opposition to ‘our own, present critical preference for reading in silence’ (p. 31). The role played by Edmund Gosse in promoting French poetic forms such as the villanelle as suitable for poetry in English is discussed by Amanda L. French in ‘Edmund Gosse and the Stubborn Vilanelle Blunder’ (VP 48[2010] 243-66). Contemporary poets who have favoured the villanelle have rarely recognised the debt they owe to the form’s Victorian advocates, she finds. There are two pieces on Rudyard Kipling’s poetry in the 2010 Kipling Journal. Martin Down’s ‘Rudyard Kipling: Poet and Prophet’ (KJ 84:cccxxxv[2010] 36-45) offers a brief account of the strains of religious and social prophecy in Kipling’s verse, and ‘“Ruddy’s Songs”: The Voices of Kipling’ (KJ 84:cxxxviii[2010 49-55] describes a selection of musical settings of Kipling’s poems, from the 1890s through to the twenty-first century. The poetry of Arthur Symons plays a significant role in Alex Murray’s essay ‘Forgetting London: Paris, Cultural Cartography, and Late Victorian Decadence’ (Journeys 11:ii[2010] 30-50). Murray’s contention is that Symons and the novelist George Moore use their memories of living in Paris to transform or even efface London, the domestic and imperial metropolis, in their writings about travel and place. Entry for Table of Contents Martin Dubois, Newcastle University Gregory Tate, University of Surrey New Abbreviations We have used the abbreviation JBrowS for the Journal of Browning Studies, which published its first volume in 2010. Journals Consulted ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 23 Arthurian Literature, 27 Cithara: Essays in the Judaeo Christian Tradition, 48 Cultural Critique, 74 English Literary History, 77 Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism, 60 Hopkins Quarterly, 37 Journal of Browning Studies, 1 Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 19 Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, 11 Kipling Journal, 84 Literature Compass, 7 Literature and Theology, 24 Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 13 Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 43 Notes and Queries, 57 Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 7 Religion and the Arts, 14 Review of English Studies, 61 Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 146 Studies in English Literature, 50 Tennyson Research Bulletin, 9 Times Literary Supplement, 11 June 2010 Victorian Literature and Culture, 38 Victorian Periodicals Review, 43 Victorian Poetry, 48 Victorian Review, 35 Yearbook of English Studies, 39 and 40 Books Reviewed Bailey, Suzanne. Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry. Routledge. [2010] pp. xii + 187. £80 ISBN 9 7804 1587 4779. Blocksidge, Martin. ‘A Life Lived Quickly’: Tennyson’s Friend Arthur Hallam and his Legend. SussexAP. [2010] pp. x + 309. £49.95 ($79.95) ISBN 9 7818 4519 4185. Barnett, Ryan, and Serena Trowbridge, eds. Acts of Memory: The Victorians and Beyond. Cambridge Scholars. [2010] pp. 174. £34.99 ISBN 9 7814 4382 5672. Ciuk, Andrzej and Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska, eds. Exploring Space: Spatial Notions in Cultural, Literary and Language Studies. CambridgeSP. [2010] 2 vols. £94.98 ($142.98) ISBN 9 7814 4382 1438/9 7814 4382 1445. Donaldson, Sandra, with Rita Patteson, Marjorie Stone and Beverley Taylor, eds. The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. P&C. [2010] 5 vols. £450 ($795) ISBN 9 7818 5196 9005. Easson, Angus. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Routledge. [2010] pp. 224. £14.99 ISBN 9 7804 1527 3244. Fordham, Finn. I Do, I Undo, I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves. OUP. [2010] pp. 296. $99 ISBN 9 7801 9956 9403. Hagan, Edward, Philip Kelley and Scott Lewis, eds. The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 17. Wedgestone. [2010] pp. xvi + 432. $110 ISBN 9 7809 1145 9340. Hagan, Edward, Philip Kelley and Scott Lewis, eds. The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 18. Wedgestone. [2010] pp. xvi + 432. $110 ISBN 9 7809 1145 9357. Hetherington, Naomi, and Nadia Valman, eds. Amy Levy: Critical Essays. Ohio UP. [2010] pp. 253. $64.95 ISBN 9 7808 2141 9052. Horlacher, Stefan, Stefan Glomb and Lars Heiler, eds. Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan. [2010] pp. 280. £55 ISBN 9 7802 3061 9906. Hughes, Linda K. The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry. CUP. [2010] pp. 344. £50 ISBN 9 7805 2185 6249. Jamison, Anne. Poetics en Passant: Redefining the Relationship between Victorian and Modern Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan. [2010] pp. 256. £57 ISBN 9 7802 3061 8992. Karlin, Daniel, Joseph Phelan and John Woolford, eds. Robert Browning: Selected Poems. Longman. [2010] pp. xxx + 901. £20.99 ISBN 9 7814 0584 1139. Levin, Yisrael, ed. A. C. Swinburne and the Singing Word: New Perspectives on the Mature Work. Ashgate. [2010] pp. xii + 190. £55 ISBN 9 7807 5466 9968. Lewisohn, Leonard, ed. Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry. Tauris. [2010] pp. xxvi + 330. £45 ISBN 9 7818 4885 3393. Machann, Clinton. Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading. Ashgate. [2010] pp. vi + 166. £50 ISBN 9 7807 5466 6875. Mahalik, Christina, ed. Merchants, Barons, Sellers and Suits: The Changing Images of the Businessman through Literature. Cambridge Scholars. [2010] pp. 350. £44.99 ISBN 9 7814 4382 4194. Meyer, Kinereth, and Rachel Salmon Deshen. Reading the Underthought: Jewish Hermeneutics and the Christian Poetry of Hopkins and Eliot. Catholic U of America P. [2010] pp. 314. $69.95 ISBN 9 7808 1321 7420. Miller, J. Hillis. The Medium is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies. SussexAP. [2009] pp. xiv + 93. £14.95 ($27.50) ISBN 9 7818 4519 3195. Nelson, Holly Faith, Lynn R. Szabo, and Jens Zimmerman, eds. Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory. Wilfrid Laurier UP. [2010] pp. 480. $85 ISBN 9 7815 5458 1849. O’Neill, Michael, ed. The Cambridge History of English Poetry. CUP. [2010] pp. 1115. £120 ISBN 9 7805 2188 3061. Page, Norman and Valerie Purton, eds. The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Tennyson. PalMac. [2010] pp. xviii + 340. £65 ISBN 9 7814 0394 3170. Parham, John. Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination. Rodopi. [2010] pp. 308. $93 ISBN 9 7890 4203 1067. Pinch, Adela. Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing. CUP. [2010] pp. 264. £55 ISBN 9 7805 2176 4643. Roilos, Panagiotis, ed. Imagination and Logos: Essays on C. P. Cavafy. HarvardUP. [2010] pp. xii + 287. $55 ISBN 9 7806 7405 3397. Strasen, Sven and Peter Wenzel, eds. Discourses of Mobility—Mobility of Discourse: The Conceptualization of Trains, Cars and Planes in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Poetry. WVT. [2010] pp. iv + 224. €23.50 ISBN 9 7838 6821 2570.