Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.

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

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.

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.

"This book will be of interest to students of English literature - particularly those working on Bloomian influence theory, Wordsworth, or Browning - as well as to more senior scholars working on poetry of the Romantic and Victorian periods. The work will also interest those working on the deeply ambiguous figure of the later Browning - simultaneously the most popular poet in the country after Tennyson and one of the most uncompromisingly complex - and his vexed relationship with the reading public."--BOOK JACKET.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) was the first major woman poet in the English literary tradition. Her significance has been obscured in this century by her erasure from most literary histories and her exclusion from academic anthologies. Dorothy Mermin's critical and biographical study argues for Barrett Browning's originative role in both the Victorian poetic tradition and the development of women's literature. Barrett Browning's place at the wellhead of a new female tradition remains the single most important fact about her in terms of literary history, and it was central to her self-consciousness as a poet. Mermin's study shows that Barrett Browning's anomalous situation was constantly present to her imagination and that questions of gender shaped almost everything she wrote. Mermin argues that Barrett Browning's poetry covertly inspects and dismantles the barriers set in her path by gender and that in her major works—Sonnets from the Portuguese, Aurora Leigh, her best political poems, "A Musical Instrument"—difficulty is turned into triumph, incorporating the author's femininity, her situation as a woman poet, and her increasingly substantial fame. Mermin skillfully interweaves biography and close readings of the poems to show precisely how Barrett Browning's life as a woman writer is a part of the essential meaning of her art. Both her personal and her literary achievements are exceptionally well documented, especially for her formative years. Mermin makes extensive use of the poet's early essays, a diary covering most of her twenty-sixth year, and the enormous number of letters that have survived. Ranging from her earliest ambitions through her long periods of discouragement and illness to her happy married life with Robert Browning, this comprehensive study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is essential reading for students of the Victorian period, English literature, and women's studies.

The perfect gift for your favorite poet or lover of poetry From Old English to the poetry of the present, discover how a poem's form shapes and informs the reader's and writer's experience.

The presentation of poetry to auditor and reader from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.

The dramatic monologue is traditionally associated with Victorian poets such as Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and is generally considered to have disappeared with the onset of modernism in the twentieth century. Glennis Byron unravels its history and argues that, contrary to belief, the monologue remains popular to this day. This far-reaching and neatly structured volume: * explores the origins of the monologue and presents a history of definitions of the term * considers the monologue as a form of social critique * explores issues at play in our understanding of the genre, such as subjectivity, gender and politics * traces the development of the genre through to the present day. Taking as example the increasingly politicized nature of contemporary poetry, the author clearly and succinctly presents an account of the monologue's growing popularity over the past twenty years.