The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman

Description

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. Front Matter ....Pages i-xi Introduction (Veronica Alfano)....Pages 1-57 Tennyson’s Lyric Betrayals: Feminine Re-Formation in The Princess and In Memoriam (Veronica Alfano)....Pages 59-162 Remembering Christina Rossetti: Dead Women and the Afterlife of Lyric (Veronica Alfano)....Pages 163-207 The Forgetting of Symons: Photographic Memory and Formal Reincarnation (Veronica Alfano)....Pages 209-269 Amnesia and Nostalgia in Housman’s A Shropshire Lad: “Those Blue Remembered Hills” (Veronica Alfano)....Pages 271-324 Coda (Veronica Alfano)....Pages 325-326 Back Matter ....Pages 327-372