The Lyric in Victorian Memory

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Veronica Alfano

   Pages 1-57

3. Tennyson’s Lyric Betrayals: Feminine Re-Formation in The Princess and In Memoriam

   • Veronica Alfano

   Pages 59-162

4. Remembering Christina Rossetti: Dead Women and the Afterlife of Lyric

   • Veronica Alfano

   Pages 163-207

5. The Forgetting of Symons: Photographic Memory and Formal Reincarnation

   • Veronica Alfano

   Pages 209-269

6. Amnesia and Nostalgia in Housman’s A Shropshire Lad: “Those Blue Remembered Hills”

   • Veronica Alfano

   Pages 271-324

7. Coda

   • Veronica Alfano

   Pages 325-326

8. Back Matter

   Pages 327-372

   PDF

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.

• Poetry
• Nineteenth Century
• British Literature
• Memory Studies
• Rossetti
• British and Irish Literature

“Veronica Alfano’s beautifully written study offers a fresh take on an ancient topic, the mnemonic function of poetry.  In showing how poems succeed in (but also resist) remembering and being remembered, Alfano persuasively demonstrates the centrality of poetry to Victorian concepts of memory while also shedding new light on the nature of lyric itself.” (Erik Gray, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA)

“This is an erudite, sensitive study of Victorian lyrics about memory, loss, and time. Alfano uncovers a fascinating tradition of poetry that explores the inextricability of remembering and forgetting, of personal history and cultural nostalgia.” (Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Professor of English, Wesleyan University, USA)

• Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

  Veronica Alfano

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.

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