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This book explores Tennyson’s representation of rapture, or being carried away, as a radical mechanism of transformation—theological, social, political, or personal—and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. The poet’s fascination with transformation is figured formally in the genre he is credited with inventing, the dramatic monologue. Situating Tennyson within communities of Victorian classicists, explorers, politicians, theologians, and sexologists, this book offers substantial original readings of a range of Tennyson’s major poems. Tennyson’s Rapture investigates the poet’s previously unrecognized intimacy with the theological movements in early Victorian Britain that are the acknowledged roots of contemporary Pentacostalism (with its belief in the oncoming rapture), and its formative relation to his poetic innovation. Tennyson’ work recurs persistently as well to classical instances of rapture, of mortals being borne away by immortals, a pattern illuminated by the poet’s intellectual and emotional investments in advances in philological scholarship and archeological exploration, in particular the contested discovery of Homer’s raptured Troy. Tennyson’s attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, informed by the political and philosophical writings of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam (the subject of In Memoriam) and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall shows the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson’s long career. Proposing a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, this book argues against a critical tradition that sees speakers as unintentionally self-revealing and ignorant of the implications of their speech, demonstrating instead the commanding cultural ambitions of dramatic speakers and the poet himself.

It is paradoxical that instinct became a central term for late Victorian sexual sciences as they were elaborated in the medicalized spaces of confession and introspection, given that instinct had long been defined in its opposition to self-conscious thought. The book argues that this paradox emerges as a result (and a cause) of changes to how instinct operates as a mechanism for governmentality as it helps gloss over contradictions in British liberalism that had been made palpable as writers around the turn of the twentieth century grappled with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism. As a result of these changes, instinct takes on new appeal to elite European men who identify instinct as both an agent of civilizational “progress” and a force that offers (in contradistinction to the lack associated with desire) a plenitude that can hold the alienation of self-consciousness at bay. Without wholly or consistently unseating the idea that instinct marked the proper province of women, workers and/or savages, this shift in instinct’s appeal to civilized European men nonetheless modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender. The book makes this argument by examining materials such as legal and parliamentary papers about the regulation of obscenity, pornographic fiction, ethnological monographs about Aboriginal Australians, treatises on political economy, and suffragette memoirs alongside scientific texts in evolutionary theory, psychology, sexology, and early psychoanalysis.

Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century examines the importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The years between the naval blockade of 1775, which began the American War, and the start of the First World War in 1914 witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast on both sides of the Atlantic. Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, coasts were often thought of as unhealthy, dangerous places. Developments in both medicine and aesthetics changed this. Increasingly, the coast could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation – a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production. Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. Spanning the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and including interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geography, these essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies speak across traditional period and disciplinary boundaries.

This book develops a case study of a single ancient Greek verse genre, epigram, in its modern reception from 1805 to 1929. Previously exclusive to an educated elite for whom it served time-honoured functions in pedagogy and social exchange, epigram in the nineteenth century became an important site of contestation between mainstream and dissident Hellenisms in the public sphere. Its principal literary repository, the Greek Anthology, was hailed as a unique social document which gave unmediated access to ancient private lives. Picking and choosing from its thousands of poems let translators and literary historians string together any story they wanted about the Greek ‘Genius’, the national and racial spirit which was widely felt to live again through modern British character and achievement; so these stories were potentially about ‘us’, or about who ‘we’ might become in future. One book of the Anthology, however, stuck out as alien: the twelfth, dedicated to the love of men for handsome youths. Subcultural appropriations of the Anthology thus became an important tool in forging an honourable genealogy for male homosexual desire. In turn, these appropriations provoked a backlash by conservative critics, the after-effects of whose rhetoric of containment is still with us in epigram studies today. By tracking this one ‘minor’ genre through a century and more of (mis)representation, Greek Epigram in Reception therefore throws new light on the complex processes by which ancient literary works are received in translation, selection, and exegesis, and on how these processes forever change the texts on which they operate.

The Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott is one of the most famous dictionaries in the world, and for the past century-and-a-half has been a constant and indispensable presence in teaching, learning, and research on ancient Greek throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. Despite continuous modification and updating, it is still recognizably a Victorian creation; at the same time, however, it carries undiminished authority both for its account of the Greek language and for its system of organizing and presenting linguistic data. This book includes chapters on all aspects of the history, constitution, and problematics of this extraordinary work, examining its complex history and appreciating it as a monument to the challenges and pitfalls of classical scholarship. The chapters combine a variety of approaches and methodologies—historical, philological, theoretical—in order to situate the book within the various disciplines to which it is relevant; from semantics, lexicography, and historical linguistics to literary theory, Victorian studies, and the history of the book. Paying tribute to the Lexicon’s enormous effect on the evolving theory and practice of lexicography, it also includes a section looking forward to new developments in dictionary-making in the digital age, bringing comprehensively up to date the question of what the future holds for this fascinating and perplexing monument to the challenges of understanding an ancient language.