(DOWNLOAD) "Telling It Slant: Promethean, Whig, And Dissenting Politics in Elizabeth Barrett's Poetry of the 1830S." by Victorian Poetry " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Telling It Slant: Promethean, Whig, And Dissenting Politics in Elizabeth Barrett's Poetry of the 1830S.
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 234 KB
Description
Since the 1970s and the start of the process of recovering Elizabeth Barrett Browning from the "servants' quarters" of the "mansion" of Literature where, in Virginia Woolf's famous description, the poet "bangs the crockery around and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point of a knife," (1) critics have reconsidered EBB and her works from a number of illuminating and persuasive critical positions. Indeed, we are now coming to recognize EBB as important for our understanding of areas as diverse as the experiences of the nineteenth-century woman writer, developments in Romantic and Victorian poetic aesthetics, and the construction of the nineteenth-century vates figure. "How shall we re-read thee? Let me count the ways." One area of inquiry which has been receiving increased critical attention of late is EBB's insightful, challenging, and sometimes controversial engagement with nineteenth-century European politics. (2) Her later works--Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Aurora Leigh (1856), and Poems before Congress (1861)--have been a key focus of this inquiry, but as I have argued elsewhere (Avery and Stott, pp. 33-64), EBB was politically engaged from a very early age. Like her father and her eldest brother, she was a fervent supporter of the Whigs, the party of opposition whose political philosophy had at its heart a fundamental concern with the legal, civil, and religious rights of the individual--rights for which EBB herself would spend most of her life fighting. Certainly it is possible to read her earliest writings in this context. The Battle of Marathon (1820), for example, deals explicitly with the emergence of the notion of democracy and political egalitarianism, while An Essay on Mind (1826) and the first poems which EBB published in The New Monthly Magazine and The Globe and Traveller show the poet interrogating the contemporary Greek war of independence against Turkey. (3) It is hardly surprising, then, that EBB's mother would accuse her daughter--in striking contrast to the mythologized image of the sickly poet--of suffering from "the infection of politics." (4)