Englishness and Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era

Two recent scholar books with Brontë relations:

Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period
Colonialism and the Politics of Performance

* Imprint: Ashgate
* Illustrations: Includes 5 b&w illustrations
* Published: June 2008
* Format: 234 x 156 mm
* Extent: 184 pages
* Binding: Hardback
* ISBN: 978-0-7546-5848-1

Angelia Poon examines how British colonial authority in the nineteenth century was predicated on its being rendered in ways that were recognizably 'English'. Reading a range of texts by authors that include Charlotte Brontë, Mary Seacole, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, and H. Rider Haggard, Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period focuses on the strategies - narrative, illustrative, and rhetorical - used to perform English subjectivity during the time of the British Empire.

Characterising these performances, which ranged from the playful, ironic, and fantastical to the morally serious and determinedly didactic, was an emphasis on the corporeal body as not only gendered, racialised, and classed, but as (in)visible, desiring, bound in particular ways to space, and marked by certain physical stylizations and ways of thinking. As she shines a light on the English subject in the act of being and becoming, Poon casts new light on the changing historical circumstances and discontinuities in the performances of Englishness to disclose both the normative power of colonial authority as well as the possibilities for resistance.
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About the Author: Angelia Poon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Chapter 1 is entitled English homebodies: the politics of spectacle and domesticity in mid-century Victorian conduct literature and Jane Eyre.

Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era

* Imprint: Ashgate
* Illustrations: Includes 5 b&w illustrations
* Published: June 2008
* Format: 234 x 156 mm
* Extent: 250 pages
* Binding: Hardback
* ISBN: 978-0-7546-5788-0
* Series : The Nineteenth Century Series

In tracing those deliberate and accidental Romantic echoes that reverberate through the Victorian age into the beginning of the twentieth century, this collection acknowledges that the Victorians decided for themselves how to define what is 'Romantic'. The essays explore the extent to which Victorianism can be distinguished from its Romantic precursors, or whether it is possible to conceive of Romanticism without the influence of these Victorian definitions. Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era reassesses Romantic literature's immediate cultural and literary legacy in the late nineteenth century, showing how the Victorian writings of Matthew Arnold, Wilkie Collins, the Brontës, the Brownings, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and the Rossettis were instrumental in shaping Romanticism as a cultural phenomenon.

Many of these Victorian writers found in the biographical, literary, and historical models of Chatterton, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth touchstones for reappraising their own creative potential and artistic identity. Whether the Victorians affirmed or revolted against the Romanticism of their early years, their attitudes towards Romantic values enriched and intensified the personal, creative, and social dilemmas described in their art. Taken together, the essays in this collection reflect on current critical dialogues about literary periodisation and contribute to our understanding of how these contemporary debates stem from Romanticism's inception in the Victorian age.
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About the Editor: Andrew Radford is Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK and Mark Sandy is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK.
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The book contains the essay 'Infinite Passion': variations on a romantic topic in Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Swinburne, Hopkins, Wilde and Dowson by Michael O'Neill.

Categories: Books, Scholar, Victorian Era