The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti

Description

How do we begin to talk about Christina Rossetti in history? While she has been rapidly emerging from the shadows of New Critical neglect, in her afterlife as a historical personage and woman poet Christina Rossetti continues to haunt the reader. Yet the attempt to access the dead author (superlatively mythologised as feminine - muse, saint, virgin, sister, Jael) leads us further away from the material, historical origin of the writing. As earnestly as she is recovered, she vanishes from our critical narrative. Indeed, the signature 'Christina Rossetti' is a trope, a displaced subjectivity, emptied of history, frustrating new historical reclamations. This book constructs Christina Rossetti's afterlife in a multiple sense through an analysis of the posthumous in her work, the construction of the trope 'Christina Rossetti' by her brothers, and a reception history. The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti begins by asking what it costs to give voice to silenced and neglected women poets. The study then moves through the field of her after-effects - biographies and reminiscences, visual representations, manuscript and editorial revisions, the critical consumption of 'Goblin Market' - to offer new figures of reading the signature 'Christina Rossetti' which refuse to exorcise her ghostly presence.