The Elusive Self In The Poetry Of Robert Browning

The variety of Browning's poetry has made it difficult to see his work as a canon rather than merely a collection. The Elusive Self takes issue with the opinion that Browning's art is diffuse and argues instead for a unity born of his interest in man's acts of introspection. The author observes in Browning's idiosyncratic style and sense of time an adaptation of Romantic notions of spontaneity. She reinterprets his obsession with Perseus figures and investigates the hitherto neglected strain of apocalyptic imagery that helps Browning define the process of self-confrontation. This study identifies for the first time Browning's most innovative contribution to Victorian poetry, his development of the confession manqué. This genre is seen to enact the strategies whereby man balks at the truths he seems to seek and defers or falsifies confessional self-discovery. The Elusive Self is a clear presentation of character and the psychological workings of the characters' conflicted selves. Its thematic approach, supported by new observations on the poet's personal myths and verbal habits, offers a fresh synthesis of Browning's art.

Robert Browning's pre-eminent status amongst Victorian poets has endured despite the recent broadening of the literary canon. He is the main practitioner of the period's most important poetic genre, the dramatic monologue, while his engagement with many aspects of nineteenth-century culture makes him a key figure in the wider field of Victorian studies. This stimulating introduction to Browning criticism provides an overview of the major responses to the poet's work over the last two hundred years. It offers an insightful guide to criticism from various theoretical perspectives, elucidating Browning's participation in Victorian debates about aesthetics, history, politics, religion, gender and psychology.

Provides insight into five of Browning's most influential works along with a brief biography of the poet.

Accessibly written throughout, this guidebook covers biographical details, information on the historical and social contexts of Browning's work, an overview of the full range of his work and a survey of the major critical debates surrounding him and his work.

Taking an original approach to Robert Browning's poetics, Britta Martens focuses on a corpus of relatively neglected poems in Browning's own voice in which he reflects on his poetry, his self-conceptualization and his place in the poetic tradition. She analyzes his work in relation to Romanticism, Victorian reactions to the Romantic legacy, and wider nineteenth-century changes in poetic taste, to argue that in these poems, as in his more frequently studied dramatic monologues, Browning deploys varied dramatic methods of self-representation, often critically and ironically exposing the biases and limitations of the seemingly authoritative speaker 'Browning'. The poems thus become devices for Browning's detached evaluation of his own and of others' poetics, an evaluation never fully explicit but presented with elusive economy for the astute reader to interpret. The confrontation between the personal authorial voice and the dramatic voice in these poems provides revealing insights into the poet's highly self-conscious, conflicted and sustained engagement with the Romantic tradition and the diversely challenging reader expectations that he faces in a post-Romantic age. As the Victorian most rigorous in his rejection of Romantic self-expression, Browning is a key transitional figure between the sharply antagonistic periods of Romanticism and Modernism. He is also, as Martens persuasively demonstrates, a poet of complex contradictions and an illuminating case study for addressing the perennial issues of voice, authorial authority and self-reference.

This collection of essays attempts to address the disparate historical and critical ways religion informs the literature and culture of nineteenth century England, showing how a representative group of major Victorians negotiated its impact. The collection attempts to present Victorian religious discourse not as monologic but as dialogic, if not protean. It seeks to make available new understandings of nineteenth-century British literature as well as to elucidate the extent to which religious discourse is vested in Victorian cultural thoughts and practice.

'...an illuminating survey work by a robust and powerful intelligence with an impressive grasp of a great deal of material.' Tony Tanner, The Times Literary Supplement High Victorian Culture is an in-depth study of Victorian Literature and culture in its heyday, from the accession to the throne by Queen Victoria in 1837 to her proclamation as Empress of India in 1877 - the age of Dickens, Carlyle, Mill, George Eliot, Tennyson and Browning. It is a time of growing national self-confidence and of impressive industrial, scientific and literary achievements; yet it is also an age marked by dislocation and uncertainty. Freedom of speech and openness of discussion were values on which Victorians ostensibly prided themselves, yet the actual prospect was one which high victorian culture found deeply troubling.

An edited collection on poetic creation in the Victorian period that studies nine major Victorian poets: Wordsworth, Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Clough, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Swinburne, and Yeats.