This book is a study of nineteenth-century poems that remember, yearn for, fixate on, and forget the past. Reflecting the current critical drive to reconcile formalist and historicist approaches to literature, it uses close readings to trace the complex interactions between memory as a theme and the (often-memorable) formal traits such as brevity, stanzaic structure, and sonic repetition that appear in the lyrics examined. This book considers the interwoven nature of remembering and forgetting in the work of four Victorian poets. It uses this theme to shed new light on the relationship between lyric and narrative, on the connections between gender and genre, and on the way in which Victorians represented and commemorated the past.

It helps to fulfil a still-extant critical need as it presents a sustained and wide-ranging discussion of Victorian lyric, examining the authorial anxieties and aspirations such poetry reveals, rather than privileging dramatic or narrative modes It features a series of close readings that view the theme of recollection through the lens of form in both well-known and more obscure poems; these readings are then connected to Victorian conceptions of memory, loss, and nostalgia more generally conceived. In this way it builds on the influential notion of a nineteenth-century crisis of memory by investigating, more than any other study, the inevitable simultaneity of remembering and forgetting in Victorian verse. Finally, it expands the theme of memory to encompass technologies of reproduction and circulation, such as photographs, Claude glasses, and anthologies It ties its main arguments about memory to formal memorizability, reception history, and Victorian poets' complex anticipations of (and resistances to) the ways in which they would be remembered and read. This provides a blueprint for future research Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext
Veronica Alfano is Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, and Research Fellow at Australian Catholic University, Australia. She is the co-editor (with Andrew Stauffer) of Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2.Tennyson's Lyric Betrayals: Feminine Re-Formation in The Princess and In Memoriam.- 3. Remembering Christina Rossetti: Dead Women and the Afterlife of Lyric.- 4. The Forgetting of Symons: Photographic Memory and Formal Reincarnation.- 5. Amnesia and Nostalgia in Housman's A Shropshire Lad: What are those blue remembered hills?.- Coda.- Bibliography.-