This book is the definitive guide to Victorian poetry, which its author approaches in the light of modern critical concerns and contemporary contexts.
Valentine Cunningham exhibits encyclopedic knowledge of the poetry produced in this period and offers dazzling close readings of a number of well-known poems
Draws on the work of major Victorian poets and their works as well as many of the less well-known poets and poems
Reads poems and poets in the light of both Victorian and modern critical concerns
Places poetry in its personal, aesthetic, historical, and ideological context
Organized in terms of the Victorian anxieties of self, body, and melancholy
Argues that rhyming/repetition is the major formal feature of Victorian poetry
Highlights the Victorian obsession with small subjects in small poems
Shows how Victorian poetry attempts to engage with the modern subject and how its modernity segues into modernism and postmodernism
About the Author
Valentine Cunningham is Professor of English Language and Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His publications include Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (1975), In The Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History (Blackwell, 1994), The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (ed., Blackwell, 2000), and Reading After Theory (Blackwell, 2002).
