Michael Millgate
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183662
- eISBN:
- 9780191674099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183662.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter discusses the life and works of Robert Browning after the death of his wife. He consciously entered the last phase of his life after her death and spent the remaining twenty-eight years ...
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This chapter discusses the life and works of Robert Browning after the death of his wife. He consciously entered the last phase of his life after her death and spent the remaining twenty-eight years of his life settling within the established patterns of his time. In this chapter, his elusiveness, his often self-defensive mode, and his carefully managed mode of life which was entirely open yet in actuality intensely private is discussed and analyzed within the context of posterity, self-protection, and self-projection. His dependence and deference to his publisher and his deep abhorrence to posthumous intrusions are discussed as well. However, reclusive and defensive, he achieved famed, affection, and admiration of a world-wide readership and was ranked alongside Tennyson. He achieved a fitting conclusion to his career and produced a summative collection of final volumes that include Parleyings, Ferishtah's Fancies, and Asolando. Included as well in this chapter is a description of his son, Pen Browning and his role in maintaining the reputation of his famous poet parents and in preserving his father's literary work and reputation.Less
This chapter discusses the life and works of Robert Browning after the death of his wife. He consciously entered the last phase of his life after her death and spent the remaining twenty-eight years of his life settling within the established patterns of his time. In this chapter, his elusiveness, his often self-defensive mode, and his carefully managed mode of life which was entirely open yet in actuality intensely private is discussed and analyzed within the context of posterity, self-protection, and self-projection. His dependence and deference to his publisher and his deep abhorrence to posthumous intrusions are discussed as well. However, reclusive and defensive, he achieved famed, affection, and admiration of a world-wide readership and was ranked alongside Tennyson. He achieved a fitting conclusion to his career and produced a summative collection of final volumes that include Parleyings, Ferishtah's Fancies, and Asolando. Included as well in this chapter is a description of his son, Pen Browning and his role in maintaining the reputation of his famous poet parents and in preserving his father's literary work and reputation.
Daniel Karlin
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112297
- eISBN:
- 9780191670756
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112297.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Poetry
‘Gr-r-r--there go, my heart's abhorrence! Water your damned flower-pots, do! If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, God's blood, would not mine kill you!’ The bitter and twisted monk of ‘Soliloquy of ...
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‘Gr-r-r--there go, my heart's abhorrence! Water your damned flower-pots, do! If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, God's blood, would not mine kill you!’ The bitter and twisted monk of ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ is Robert Browning's best-known hater, but hatred was a topic to which he returned again and again in both letters and poems. This book is a study of Browning's hatreds, and their influence on his poetry. Browning was himself a ‘good hater’, and the author analyses his hatreds of figures such as Wordsworth (the model for his ‘Lost Leader’), and more generally, tyranny and the abuse of power, and deceit or quackery in personal relationships or intellectual systems. Tracing the subtlest windings and branchings of Browning's idea of hatred through detailed discussion of key poems, the author shows how Browning's work displays an unequalled grasp of hatred as a personal emotion, as an intellectual principle, and as a source of artistic creativity. Particular attention is devoted to Browning's compulsive and compelling exploration of the duality of love and hate.Less
‘Gr-r-r--there go, my heart's abhorrence! Water your damned flower-pots, do! If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, God's blood, would not mine kill you!’ The bitter and twisted monk of ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ is Robert Browning's best-known hater, but hatred was a topic to which he returned again and again in both letters and poems. This book is a study of Browning's hatreds, and their influence on his poetry. Browning was himself a ‘good hater’, and the author analyses his hatreds of figures such as Wordsworth (the model for his ‘Lost Leader’), and more generally, tyranny and the abuse of power, and deceit or quackery in personal relationships or intellectual systems. Tracing the subtlest windings and branchings of Browning's idea of hatred through detailed discussion of key poems, the author shows how Browning's work displays an unequalled grasp of hatred as a personal emotion, as an intellectual principle, and as a source of artistic creativity. Particular attention is devoted to Browning's compulsive and compelling exploration of the duality of love and hate.
William Oddie
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199582013
- eISBN:
- 9780191702303
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582013.003.0007
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life and works from 1903–4. Following the publication of his biography of Robert Browning in 1903, Chesterton entered, in the words of the anonymous reviewer of ...
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This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life and works from 1903–4. Following the publication of his biography of Robert Browning in 1903, Chesterton entered, in the words of the anonymous reviewer of Vanity Fair, ‘a new phase of his career as a writer’; he now belonged, the reviewer pronounced, ‘to the men of letters as apart from the journalists’. It also became clear that Chesterton's own ideas about religion had moved on and that they had become both more corporate and more doctrinal than Robert Browning reflects. By the end of the 1903 this was to become strikingly apparent in his engagement in a vigorous public controversy over the integrity of the Christian religion, an episode which had probably become an increasingly inevitable outcome of his intellectual history during the previous three years.Less
This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life and works from 1903–4. Following the publication of his biography of Robert Browning in 1903, Chesterton entered, in the words of the anonymous reviewer of Vanity Fair, ‘a new phase of his career as a writer’; he now belonged, the reviewer pronounced, ‘to the men of letters as apart from the journalists’. It also became clear that Chesterton's own ideas about religion had moved on and that they had become both more corporate and more doctrinal than Robert Browning reflects. By the end of the 1903 this was to become strikingly apparent in his engagement in a vigorous public controversy over the integrity of the Christian religion, an episode which had probably become an increasingly inevitable outcome of his intellectual history during the previous three years.
J. B. BULLEN
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128885
- eISBN:
- 9780191671722
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128885.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
The similarity between John Ruskin’s account of Italian Renaissance tombs and Robert Browning’s imaginary tomb in St Praxed was so striking that Ruskin drew attention to it in the fourth volume of ...
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The similarity between John Ruskin’s account of Italian Renaissance tombs and Robert Browning’s imaginary tomb in St Praxed was so striking that Ruskin drew attention to it in the fourth volume of Modern Painters. The verse of Browning’s poem ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St Praxed’s Church’ has none of the assertive moral certainty of John Ruskin’s prose. The changes in style of the tombs of northern Italy are representative of the growth of a larger concept — Renaissance ‘Pride of State’ — and this in turn contributes materially to the corruption and fall of Venice and hence to the rest of Europe. There can be little doubt that Browning, like Ruskin, is drawing energy from that combination of religion, history, and art which was such an explosive one in the 1840s. Even though the term ‘Renaissance’ is not a part of Browning’s vocabulary, he seems to favour a complex form of ‘realism’ rather than the more naive ‘idealism’ which was so fashionable in current Renaissance historiography.Less
The similarity between John Ruskin’s account of Italian Renaissance tombs and Robert Browning’s imaginary tomb in St Praxed was so striking that Ruskin drew attention to it in the fourth volume of Modern Painters. The verse of Browning’s poem ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St Praxed’s Church’ has none of the assertive moral certainty of John Ruskin’s prose. The changes in style of the tombs of northern Italy are representative of the growth of a larger concept — Renaissance ‘Pride of State’ — and this in turn contributes materially to the corruption and fall of Venice and hence to the rest of Europe. There can be little doubt that Browning, like Ruskin, is drawing energy from that combination of religion, history, and art which was such an explosive one in the 1840s. Even though the term ‘Renaissance’ is not a part of Browning’s vocabulary, he seems to favour a complex form of ‘realism’ rather than the more naive ‘idealism’ which was so fashionable in current Renaissance historiography.
Paul Turner
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122395
- eISBN:
- 9780191671401
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122395.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
What makes Robert Browning’s poetry exhilarating is not optimism, but strenuous vitality. Life is presented as a challenge. Failure is inevitable but unimportant, so long as the fight goes on. The ...
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What makes Robert Browning’s poetry exhilarating is not optimism, but strenuous vitality. Life is presented as a challenge. Failure is inevitable but unimportant, so long as the fight goes on. The murdered Pompilia, refusing on her deathbed to admit ‘one faint fleck of failure’ in Caponsacchi’s attempt to save her life, expresses almost too literally this never-say-die spirit. Even Andrea del Sarto, the most depressed and defeatist of all Browning’s characters, is last heard planning to paint a vast mural in heaven, and stressing (‘as I choose’) that he is still, in a way, the master of his fate. This sense of irrepressible vitality is conveyed, not just through character, action, or explicit statement, but more immediately by language, versification, and poetic texture. Browning’s very individual style was evidently developed to satisfy the special feeling for ‘fact’ that he shared with Thomas Carlyle, and that drew him towards historical subjects.Less
What makes Robert Browning’s poetry exhilarating is not optimism, but strenuous vitality. Life is presented as a challenge. Failure is inevitable but unimportant, so long as the fight goes on. The murdered Pompilia, refusing on her deathbed to admit ‘one faint fleck of failure’ in Caponsacchi’s attempt to save her life, expresses almost too literally this never-say-die spirit. Even Andrea del Sarto, the most depressed and defeatist of all Browning’s characters, is last heard planning to paint a vast mural in heaven, and stressing (‘as I choose’) that he is still, in a way, the master of his fate. This sense of irrepressible vitality is conveyed, not just through character, action, or explicit statement, but more immediately by language, versification, and poetic texture. Browning’s very individual style was evidently developed to satisfy the special feeling for ‘fact’ that he shared with Thomas Carlyle, and that drew him towards historical subjects.
Philipp Erchinger
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474438957
- eISBN:
- 9781474453790
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474438957.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter concentrates on Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a series of twelve dramatic monologues, which has repeatedly been described as an instance of “empiricism in literature” ...
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This chapter concentrates on Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a series of twelve dramatic monologues, which has repeatedly been described as an instance of “empiricism in literature” (Langbaum) and as one of “the most ambitious literary experiments in the period” (Slinn). Trying to substantiate and make good on such claims, the chapter argues that The Ring and the Book invites its readers to participate in the composition and evaluation of an experimental form that transfers the tradition of the epic into “a novel country” in order to create a mode of writing “in difficulties” and “encumbered with incongruities” (Walter Bagehot). As a result, The Ring and the Book refuses to be read as if it were an accomplished work. Rather, it has to be made to work. Presenting itself as an experimental arrangement, Browning’s multi-voiced and many-sided text demands its readers to follow the grain of a kaleidoscopic pattern in the making, the components of which lack an underlying ground or design to hold them in place. The chapter’s argument is developed by way of an engagement with the controversial Victorian reception of Browning’s long poem.Less
This chapter concentrates on Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a series of twelve dramatic monologues, which has repeatedly been described as an instance of “empiricism in literature” (Langbaum) and as one of “the most ambitious literary experiments in the period” (Slinn). Trying to substantiate and make good on such claims, the chapter argues that The Ring and the Book invites its readers to participate in the composition and evaluation of an experimental form that transfers the tradition of the epic into “a novel country” in order to create a mode of writing “in difficulties” and “encumbered with incongruities” (Walter Bagehot). As a result, The Ring and the Book refuses to be read as if it were an accomplished work. Rather, it has to be made to work. Presenting itself as an experimental arrangement, Browning’s multi-voiced and many-sided text demands its readers to follow the grain of a kaleidoscopic pattern in the making, the components of which lack an underlying ground or design to hold them in place. The chapter’s argument is developed by way of an engagement with the controversial Victorian reception of Browning’s long poem.
John M. Picker
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195151916
- eISBN:
- 9780199787944
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151916.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph ...
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This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph in ways that spoke to their own concerns over issues ranging from the domestic to the imperial. It presents a cultural study attentive to the varied, often contradictory later Victorian manifestations of the phonograph, in the publicity-related activities of Thomas Edison's London agent George Gouraud, who arranged for recordings to be made of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, as well as in works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Voice of Science” and “The Japanned Box”, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The phonograph, with the power to record and replay, promised a special kind of communal integrity even as it extended a troubling sense of fragmentation. Through its mechanical reproduction of voice, it offered forms of control and interaction that late Victorians initially found not impersonal and fearful as moderns later did, but in a period of diminishing mastery over empire and the self, individualized, reassuring, and even desirable.Less
This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph in ways that spoke to their own concerns over issues ranging from the domestic to the imperial. It presents a cultural study attentive to the varied, often contradictory later Victorian manifestations of the phonograph, in the publicity-related activities of Thomas Edison's London agent George Gouraud, who arranged for recordings to be made of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, as well as in works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Voice of Science” and “The Japanned Box”, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The phonograph, with the power to record and replay, promised a special kind of communal integrity even as it extended a troubling sense of fragmentation. Through its mechanical reproduction of voice, it offered forms of control and interaction that late Victorians initially found not impersonal and fearful as moderns later did, but in a period of diminishing mastery over empire and the self, individualized, reassuring, and even desirable.
Stefanie Markovits
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198718864
- eISBN:
- 9780191788314
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198718864.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Poetry
Chapter 3, “Circle-Squarers: Tennyson’s and Browning’s Form-Things,” looks at Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Browning’s The Ring and the Book, two poems that worry about circling the square: ...
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Chapter 3, “Circle-Squarers: Tennyson’s and Browning’s Form-Things,” looks at Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Browning’s The Ring and the Book, two poems that worry about circling the square: creating lyric unity out of rectilinear narrative. Both tell of marriage and adultery, combining fractured narrative form with violent plots. And despite a historical remoteness at odds with the verse-novel’s modernity, they show the pervasive influence of the genre. The chapter considers how Tennyson and Browning embed into their poems two types of gem, diamond and pearl, that can be termed form-things: objects through which to express and explore generic affiliation. Finally, it moves from circular forms back to square books, to Browning’s The Inn Album, a verse-novel that consciously modernizes The Ring and the Book even as it embraces its own marginal generic status in an effort to sidestep the intractable geometry of circled squares.Less
Chapter 3, “Circle-Squarers: Tennyson’s and Browning’s Form-Things,” looks at Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Browning’s The Ring and the Book, two poems that worry about circling the square: creating lyric unity out of rectilinear narrative. Both tell of marriage and adultery, combining fractured narrative form with violent plots. And despite a historical remoteness at odds with the verse-novel’s modernity, they show the pervasive influence of the genre. The chapter considers how Tennyson and Browning embed into their poems two types of gem, diamond and pearl, that can be termed form-things: objects through which to express and explore generic affiliation. Finally, it moves from circular forms back to square books, to Browning’s The Inn Album, a verse-novel that consciously modernizes The Ring and the Book even as it embraces its own marginal generic status in an effort to sidestep the intractable geometry of circled squares.
Matthew Reynolds
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199605712
- eISBN:
- 9780191731617
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199605712.003.0023
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Since at least the time of Dryden, a ‘dead’ translation has been a bad one. But during the nineteenth century, poets became interested in the expressive possibilities of a dead style: Browning is one ...
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Since at least the time of Dryden, a ‘dead’ translation has been a bad one. But during the nineteenth century, poets became interested in the expressive possibilities of a dead style: Browning is one example. Pound's recorded statements on translation generally assert the need to ‘present’ a ‘vivid personality’ or ‘bring a dead man to life’. But the idea that something from the past might become ‘present’ again is complex, and results in a poetry of translation which is as interested in deadness as in life. I trace this aspect of Pound's writing through his translations of Cavalcanti, Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius. The conflict owes something to wider modernist concerns; but it is fuelled by the activity of translation.Less
Since at least the time of Dryden, a ‘dead’ translation has been a bad one. But during the nineteenth century, poets became interested in the expressive possibilities of a dead style: Browning is one example. Pound's recorded statements on translation generally assert the need to ‘present’ a ‘vivid personality’ or ‘bring a dead man to life’. But the idea that something from the past might become ‘present’ again is complex, and results in a poetry of translation which is as interested in deadness as in life. I trace this aspect of Pound's writing through his translations of Cavalcanti, Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius. The conflict owes something to wider modernist concerns; but it is fuelled by the activity of translation.
Matthew Reynolds
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199605712
- eISBN:
- 9780191731617
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199605712.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Literary translators have always used different words for what they are doing: a translation can be an ‘Englishing’, a ‘rendering’, a ‘traduction’, a ‘gloze’, a ‘crib’, a ‘version’ or a ‘conversion;’ ...
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Literary translators have always used different words for what they are doing: a translation can be an ‘Englishing’, a ‘rendering’, a ‘traduction’, a ‘gloze’, a ‘crib’, a ‘version’ or a ‘conversion;’ to translate can be, not only to ‘paraphrase’ and ‘interpret’, but to ‘turn’, to ‘render’, or ‘reduce.’ These words signal the different moves that can be made in the process of reading‐making‐sense‐translating, the various things that ‘translation’ can be. I explore Browning's translation of Agamemnon, Nabokov's Eugene Onegin and Louis and Celia Zukofsky's Catullus to show what different meanings can be given to the word ‘literal’. I go on to argue that this variety of process and result has not been sufficiently recognized by translation theorists, even the subtlest such as Maria Tymoczko. In fact (I argue) it is impossible to arrive at ‘a theory’ of translation.Less
Literary translators have always used different words for what they are doing: a translation can be an ‘Englishing’, a ‘rendering’, a ‘traduction’, a ‘gloze’, a ‘crib’, a ‘version’ or a ‘conversion;’ to translate can be, not only to ‘paraphrase’ and ‘interpret’, but to ‘turn’, to ‘render’, or ‘reduce.’ These words signal the different moves that can be made in the process of reading‐making‐sense‐translating, the various things that ‘translation’ can be. I explore Browning's translation of Agamemnon, Nabokov's Eugene Onegin and Louis and Celia Zukofsky's Catullus to show what different meanings can be given to the word ‘literal’. I go on to argue that this variety of process and result has not been sufficiently recognized by translation theorists, even the subtlest such as Maria Tymoczko. In fact (I argue) it is impossible to arrive at ‘a theory’ of translation.
Stephen Cheeke
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198757207
- eISBN:
- 9780191817137
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198757207.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Criticism/Theory
Chapter 4 reads Robert Browning’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ in relation to the art-writing of John Ruskin and the Renaissance Victorian myth. Browning’s painter-monk gives voice to Ruskinian orthodoxies ...
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Chapter 4 reads Robert Browning’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ in relation to the art-writing of John Ruskin and the Renaissance Victorian myth. Browning’s painter-monk gives voice to Ruskinian orthodoxies about painting’s relation to worship and praise, and Lippi’s manifesto for modern painting embodies aspects of Ruskin’s early naturalism. Lippi also presents a psychological challenge to Ruskin’s art-theory through the ambivalence underlying his motivation. For Browning, the tension between sensuality and spirituality was characteristic of the late fifteenth century, and something out of which great religious artworks emerged. In the early works of Ruskin, they stand in opposition. When Ruskin himself studies Lippi’s work more seriously in the 1870s, he takes issue with Browning’s presentation of the painter, insisting upon the moral virtue of the artist as something evident in the paintings themselves. Their disagreement belongs within a broader cultural argument about the how the Renaissance is interpreted in the nineteenth century.Less
Chapter 4 reads Robert Browning’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ in relation to the art-writing of John Ruskin and the Renaissance Victorian myth. Browning’s painter-monk gives voice to Ruskinian orthodoxies about painting’s relation to worship and praise, and Lippi’s manifesto for modern painting embodies aspects of Ruskin’s early naturalism. Lippi also presents a psychological challenge to Ruskin’s art-theory through the ambivalence underlying his motivation. For Browning, the tension between sensuality and spirituality was characteristic of the late fifteenth century, and something out of which great religious artworks emerged. In the early works of Ruskin, they stand in opposition. When Ruskin himself studies Lippi’s work more seriously in the 1870s, he takes issue with Browning’s presentation of the painter, insisting upon the moral virtue of the artist as something evident in the paintings themselves. Their disagreement belongs within a broader cultural argument about the how the Renaissance is interpreted in the nineteenth century.
Philipp Erchinger
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474438957
- eISBN:
- 9781474453790
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474438957.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much ...
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What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds.
Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to the making of science.Less
What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds.
Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to the making of science.
Kelvin Everest
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853236740
- eISBN:
- 9781846314285
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853236740.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’, were part of his collection of poems titled Men and Women, published in 1855. These monologues focus on two real-life ...
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Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’, were part of his collection of poems titled Men and Women, published in 1855. These monologues focus on two real-life Victorian painters, Filippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto, respectively. This chapter examines some detailed features of Browning's poetry and some larger questions raised by his interest in those particular painters during the period. In particular, it considers why Browning chose those subjects and argues that his monologues are subtle and powerful character studies that offer broader meanings developed from new possibilities in the significance of Italian art, which are remarkably emergent in cultural commentary during the Victorian period. It also looks at Browning's preoccupation with Italy and things Italian, although not at all interested in its politics any more than with England's.Less
Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’, were part of his collection of poems titled Men and Women, published in 1855. These monologues focus on two real-life Victorian painters, Filippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto, respectively. This chapter examines some detailed features of Browning's poetry and some larger questions raised by his interest in those particular painters during the period. In particular, it considers why Browning chose those subjects and argues that his monologues are subtle and powerful character studies that offer broader meanings developed from new possibilities in the significance of Italian art, which are remarkably emergent in cultural commentary during the Victorian period. It also looks at Browning's preoccupation with Italy and things Italian, although not at all interested in its politics any more than with England's.
J. B. BULLEN
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128885
- eISBN:
- 9780191671722
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128885.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
The historiography of the Renaissance was turbulent and contentious; it was affected by factors which had more to do with current intellectual interests than the facts of history, and it engaged many ...
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The historiography of the Renaissance was turbulent and contentious; it was affected by factors which had more to do with current intellectual interests than the facts of history, and it engaged many writers who were not historians in any conventional sense of the word. At this stage, however, one thing is clear. The Renaissance is the product of language, of historical discourse, and it is this which permits the use of the term ‘myth’ in the context of Renaissance historiography. This book attempts to answer a number of questions about the myth. Where and in what circumstances did it originate? What was its function in the more general economy of the historiographies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? How was it developed, what shape did it take, and how did it stand in relation to contemporary religious and political issues? The book focuses on the works of, among others, Augustus Welby Pugin, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. This is the story of the germination, growth, and development of that myth.Less
The historiography of the Renaissance was turbulent and contentious; it was affected by factors which had more to do with current intellectual interests than the facts of history, and it engaged many writers who were not historians in any conventional sense of the word. At this stage, however, one thing is clear. The Renaissance is the product of language, of historical discourse, and it is this which permits the use of the term ‘myth’ in the context of Renaissance historiography. This book attempts to answer a number of questions about the myth. Where and in what circumstances did it originate? What was its function in the more general economy of the historiographies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? How was it developed, what shape did it take, and how did it stand in relation to contemporary religious and political issues? The book focuses on the works of, among others, Augustus Welby Pugin, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. This is the story of the germination, growth, and development of that myth.
Marcus Waithe
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748681327
- eISBN:
- 9781474422239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748681327.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter responds to Thomas Carlyle’s suggestion that correspondence might be a lesser form of literary ‘work’ than other forms of writing. The question of epistolary labour is particularly ...
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This chapter responds to Thomas Carlyle’s suggestion that correspondence might be a lesser form of literary ‘work’ than other forms of writing. The question of epistolary labour is particularly pertinent to the case of Elizabeth Barrett whose letters to her fellow poet Robert Browning are the subject of scrutiny here. In the course of this chapter, letters are analysed as a comforting, and sometimes experimental proxy for the more personally fraught medium of poetic and literary production.Less
This chapter responds to Thomas Carlyle’s suggestion that correspondence might be a lesser form of literary ‘work’ than other forms of writing. The question of epistolary labour is particularly pertinent to the case of Elizabeth Barrett whose letters to her fellow poet Robert Browning are the subject of scrutiny here. In the course of this chapter, letters are analysed as a comforting, and sometimes experimental proxy for the more personally fraught medium of poetic and literary production.
John Holmes
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748639403
- eISBN:
- 9780748652174
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748639403.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter examines how poets have imagined the nature of God in a Darwinian universe, from Robert Browning's ‘Caliban upon Setebos’, written in the very early 1860s in the immediate aftermath of ...
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This chapter examines how poets have imagined the nature of God in a Darwinian universe, from Robert Browning's ‘Caliban upon Setebos’, written in the very early 1860s in the immediate aftermath of The Origin of Species, to the essays and poems of the contemporary American poets Robert Pack, Philip Appleman and Pattiann Rogers. Before doing this, it looks at two sonnets which focus the mind on the implications of the arguments for and against design in nature. Caliban recognises his own lack of empathy in nature and so deduces it in God. In his essay, Pack argues that Darwin's vision of the world is consistent with one book of the Bible in particular. Like the Bible itself, Rogers' poems present God in ways that appear to be, or even are, contradictory, but that unite nonetheless in a sensitive spirituality and a tentative theology.Less
This chapter examines how poets have imagined the nature of God in a Darwinian universe, from Robert Browning's ‘Caliban upon Setebos’, written in the very early 1860s in the immediate aftermath of The Origin of Species, to the essays and poems of the contemporary American poets Robert Pack, Philip Appleman and Pattiann Rogers. Before doing this, it looks at two sonnets which focus the mind on the implications of the arguments for and against design in nature. Caliban recognises his own lack of empathy in nature and so deduces it in God. In his essay, Pack argues that Darwin's vision of the world is consistent with one book of the Bible in particular. Like the Bible itself, Rogers' poems present God in ways that appear to be, or even are, contradictory, but that unite nonetheless in a sensitive spirituality and a tentative theology.
Stephen Cheeke
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198757207
- eISBN:
- 9780191817137
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198757207.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Criticism/Theory
Chapter 3 is concerned with Browning’s response to Renaissance art, particularly Raphael. Browning has affinities with primitivist or revivalist traditions (including Pre-Raphaelitism), while being ...
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Chapter 3 is concerned with Browning’s response to Renaissance art, particularly Raphael. Browning has affinities with primitivist or revivalist traditions (including Pre-Raphaelitism), while being distinct from the denigration of the High Renaissance in the work of Ruskin and others. Raphael is a ‘problem’ in Browning’s poetry partly because he occupies the turning-point in the Victorian schema of art history, facing backwards towards a supposedly purer form of Christianity and Christian art, but also forwards to a more pagan and worldly Renaissance celebration of and absorption in antiquity. Browning’s paired poems ‘Pictor Ignotus’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’ dramatize that perceived watershed, while a Raphael Madonna plays a significant role in Caponsacchi’s monologue in The Ring and the Book. Raphael is a source of anxiety, a troubling psychological phenomenon connected to guilt, repression, and fear. Raphael and the ideology of Raphaelism are recurrently failed—that is, failed by the painters Browning dramatizes.Less
Chapter 3 is concerned with Browning’s response to Renaissance art, particularly Raphael. Browning has affinities with primitivist or revivalist traditions (including Pre-Raphaelitism), while being distinct from the denigration of the High Renaissance in the work of Ruskin and others. Raphael is a ‘problem’ in Browning’s poetry partly because he occupies the turning-point in the Victorian schema of art history, facing backwards towards a supposedly purer form of Christianity and Christian art, but also forwards to a more pagan and worldly Renaissance celebration of and absorption in antiquity. Browning’s paired poems ‘Pictor Ignotus’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’ dramatize that perceived watershed, while a Raphael Madonna plays a significant role in Caponsacchi’s monologue in The Ring and the Book. Raphael is a source of anxiety, a troubling psychological phenomenon connected to guilt, repression, and fear. Raphael and the ideology of Raphaelism are recurrently failed—that is, failed by the painters Browning dramatizes.
Daniel Karlin
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198792352
- eISBN:
- 9780191834363
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198792352.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, World Literature
In Robert Browning’s poem ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, the painter is caught playing truant in the red-light district of Renaissance Florence. Lippi, a child of the streets who has attracted the patronage of ...
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In Robert Browning’s poem ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, the painter is caught playing truant in the red-light district of Renaissance Florence. Lippi, a child of the streets who has attracted the patronage of the Catholic Church and the ruler of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici, plays throughout his monologue with songs derived from a Tuscan folk-song known as the stornello. As he tells the story of his life to the officer of the watch who has arrested him, he quotes, or makes up, half a dozen of his own stornelli. He appropriates the form for his own purpose—but the stornelli say more about him than he intends. Browning’s appropriation of the stornello overrides Lippi’s; it becomes one of the indices of Lippi’s failure as an artist, one he attributes to his enforced dependency on the Church and the ruling class, but whose roots go deeper than he is willing to acknowledge.Less
In Robert Browning’s poem ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, the painter is caught playing truant in the red-light district of Renaissance Florence. Lippi, a child of the streets who has attracted the patronage of the Catholic Church and the ruler of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici, plays throughout his monologue with songs derived from a Tuscan folk-song known as the stornello. As he tells the story of his life to the officer of the watch who has arrested him, he quotes, or makes up, half a dozen of his own stornelli. He appropriates the form for his own purpose—but the stornelli say more about him than he intends. Browning’s appropriation of the stornello overrides Lippi’s; it becomes one of the indices of Lippi’s failure as an artist, one he attributes to his enforced dependency on the Church and the ruling class, but whose roots go deeper than he is willing to acknowledge.
Isobel Hurst
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198789260
- eISBN:
- 9780191831119
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198789260.003.0008
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Plays and Playwrights: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter examines Wilde’s interest in the relationship between tragedy and comedy in the context of Victorian responses to Euripides and Menander. Debates about tragedy and comedy in relation to ...
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This chapter examines Wilde’s interest in the relationship between tragedy and comedy in the context of Victorian responses to Euripides and Menander. Debates about tragedy and comedy in relation to psychology, realism, and the representation of women in texts by Robert Browning and George Eliot are part of a wider fascination with ancient drama in Victorian literature. Wilde was one of the readers who restored Euripides to prominence and critical favour in the 1880s and 1890s. The reception of Euripides’ tragedies with a happy ending and Menander’s New Comedy, mediated by Shakespeare, influenced Wilde’s tragicomic treatment of themes from contemporary melodrama in his Society comedies.Less
This chapter examines Wilde’s interest in the relationship between tragedy and comedy in the context of Victorian responses to Euripides and Menander. Debates about tragedy and comedy in relation to psychology, realism, and the representation of women in texts by Robert Browning and George Eliot are part of a wider fascination with ancient drama in Victorian literature. Wilde was one of the readers who restored Euripides to prominence and critical favour in the 1880s and 1890s. The reception of Euripides’ tragedies with a happy ending and Menander’s New Comedy, mediated by Shakespeare, influenced Wilde’s tragicomic treatment of themes from contemporary melodrama in his Society comedies.
Sebastian Matzner
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198724278
- eISBN:
- 9780191827495
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198724278.003.0004
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter explores the impact of the new theory of metonymy on critical practice in various fields. The first of three case studies breaks new ground in translation criticism by assessing what ...
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This chapter explores the impact of the new theory of metonymy on critical practice in various fields. The first of three case studies breaks new ground in translation criticism by assessing what happens to metonymy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translations of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon into German (by Jenisch, Humboldt, Droysen, Wilamowitz-Möllendorff) and English (Browning). It renders visible previously unrecognized translation strategies, opens up new dimensions for comparing literary translations, and challenges the conventional ‘foreignization’-versus-‘domestication’ dichotomy. The second case study offers a stylistic assessment of what constitutes the distinctive ‘hellenizing’ style in Housman’s ‘Fragment of a Greek Tragedy’ and Schiller’s The Bride of Messina, highlighting the crucial role metonymy plays in it, while the third offers a critical reappraisal of (post-)structuralist reappropriations of metonymy (by de Man, Lodge, White, and others) in the light of the new insights gained here and formulates parameters for best practice in structuralist analysis and inter-arts criticism.Less
This chapter explores the impact of the new theory of metonymy on critical practice in various fields. The first of three case studies breaks new ground in translation criticism by assessing what happens to metonymy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translations of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon into German (by Jenisch, Humboldt, Droysen, Wilamowitz-Möllendorff) and English (Browning). It renders visible previously unrecognized translation strategies, opens up new dimensions for comparing literary translations, and challenges the conventional ‘foreignization’-versus-‘domestication’ dichotomy. The second case study offers a stylistic assessment of what constitutes the distinctive ‘hellenizing’ style in Housman’s ‘Fragment of a Greek Tragedy’ and Schiller’s The Bride of Messina, highlighting the crucial role metonymy plays in it, while the third offers a critical reappraisal of (post-)structuralist reappropriations of metonymy (by de Man, Lodge, White, and others) in the light of the new insights gained here and formulates parameters for best practice in structuralist analysis and inter-arts criticism.
