First published in 1977, this book looks at the versatile literary form of dramatic monologue. Although it is often associated with Browning and other poets writing between 1830 and 1930, the concept has been employed by diverse poets of multiple periods such as Ovid, Chaucer, Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. In this study, Alan Sinfield demonstrates and analyses the range and adaptability of the form through detailed examples. He shows that the technique maintains a shifting and uncertain balance between the voices of the poet and of his created speaker; when extended, as in Maud, Amours de Voyage, The Ring and the Book, and The Wasteland, the use of dramatic monologue raises questions of personality and perception. In the second part of the text, the author discusses the origins of Victorian and Modernist dramatic monologue in the dramatic complaint and the Ovidian verse epistle of earlier periods, offering a new interpretation of the value of dramatic monologue to Browning and Tennyson. Through his writing, Alan Sinfield successfully highlights the eternal vibrance of the form.

First published in 1982, this title grew from a series of essays on various aspects of narrative style; the result is a finished product that melds literary theory with linguistic methodology. It is argued that, where linguistic theory intersects with literary theory, it is narrative that provides the crucial ‘experiment’ for deciding between a communication and a non-communication theory of language and, by extension, of literature. Chapters discuss such areas as subjectivity in direct and indirect speech, the absence of the narrator, and the development of narrative style. With a detailed introduction to the subject, this reissue will be of value to students of linguistics and literature with a particular interest in narrative style and linguistic theory.

Latin Explorations, first published in 1963, offers a fresh approach to Roman poetry from Catullus to Ovid. Traditionally, the period is divided for specialist studies – Lyric, Epic and Elegy. In each of them, techniques of interpretation prevail, isolated from contemporary ideas about poetry and dominated by barriers between ‘textual’, ‘exegetical’ and ‘aesthetic’ criticism. Kenneth Quinn discerns in Roman poetry of this period the adolescence, maturity and decay of a single coherent tradition whose internal unity surpasses differences of form. His argument attempts to reverse the dissociation of purely academic research from appreciative criticism, whilst also incorporating the work of textual scholars. Each chapter is supported by a detailed analysis of the texts: nearly 700 lines of poetry are discussed and translated. Latin Explorations will be of significant value not only to students of the Classics, but also to the ‘Latinless’ general reader who is interested in Roman literature.

Robert Browning, the great Victorian poet, is often claimed to be hard to understand, largely on account of the obscurity of his language, the complexity of his thought, and his poetic style. The Browning Cyclopaedia, first published in 1891, presents an exposition of the prominent ideas of each poem, as well as its tone, its sources – historical, legendary or fanciful – and a glossary of every difficult word or allusion which might obscure the poem’s meaning. This volume remains indispensable for students of Robert Browning, as well as those interested in the general aesthetic climate of Victorian poetry.

First Published in 1992, this encyclopedia is designed to survey the social, cultural and intellectual climate of English Romanticism from approximately the 1780s and the French Revolution to the 1830s and the Reform Bill. Focussing on ‘the spirit of the age’, the book deals with the aesthetic, scientific, socioeconomic – indeed the human – environment in which the Romantics flourished. The books considers poets, playwrights and novelists; critics, editors and booksellers; painters, patrons and architects; as well as ideas, trends, fads, and conventions, the familiar and the newly discovered. The book will be of use for everyone from undergraduate English students, through to thesis-driven graduate students to teaching faculty and scholars.

First published in 1969, this edition collection brings together a series of essays offering a re-evaluation of Victorian poetry in the light of early 20th Century criticism. The essays in this collection concentrate upon the poets whose reputations suffered from the great redirection of energy in English criticism initiated in this century by Eliot, Richards and Leavis. What theses poets wrote about, the values they expressed, the form of the poems, the language they used, all these were examined and found wanting in some radical way. One of the results of this criticism was the renewal of interest in metaphysical and eighteenth-century poetry and corresponding ebb of enthusiasm for Romantic poetry and for Victorian poetry in particular. Most of the essays in this book take as their starting point questions raised by the debate on Victorian poetry, both earlier in this century and in the more recent past. There are essays on the poetry of Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, on that of Clough, who until recently has been neglected, and Hopkins, because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that he is usually considered to be a modern poet. The volume is especially valuable in that it will give a clearer understanding of the nature of Victorian poetry, concentrating as it does on those areas of a poet’s work where critical discussion seems most necessary.

First published in 1933, this study, which underwent revision in the 1960s, is a comprehensive survey of the verse of English nineteenth-century poets whose work appeared after 1860. A special feature is the full and critical treatment of minor writers. In no other book is their work so carefully evaluated. There is a full account of the minor Pre-Raphaelites, of James Thomson, the poet of The City of Dreadful Night, of Henley, Stevenson and George MacDonald. John Davidson is the subject of a long and revealing study. Evans suggests that poetry from the late nineteenth century is neglected in scholarly study, and that Victorian Romanticism deserves more attention than it has recently received.

The importance of typology in the study of early modern literature has long been accepted, yet students of Victorian culture have paid little attention to it. First published in 1980, this study demonstrates how biblical typology, an apparently arcane interpretative mode, had profound effects on the secular culture of the Victorian age: its art, literature and thought. George Landow considers the way in which the average English believer learned to read their Bible in terms of the types and shadows of Christ, the various ways in which Victorian poetry and hymns employed certain imagery, and the use of typological symbolism in narrative poetry, prose fiction, dramatic monologue and non-fiction. In a concluding chapter, he investigates the particularly complex, and often ironic, combinations of typological image and typological structure.

First published in 1993, Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia covers every aspect of the region during the Middle Ages, including rulers and saints, overviews of the countries, religion, education, politics and law, culture and material life, history, literature, and art. Written by a team of expert contributors, the encyclopedia offers those who lack command of the various Scandinavian languages a basic tool for the study of Medieval Scandinavia from roughly the Migration Period to the Reformation. With full-page maps, useful supplementary photos, cross-references and a comprehensive index, this work will be a valuable and absorbing volume for students of the Norse sagas, the Viking age, and Old English history and literature, and for anyone interested in the cultural and historical heritage of Scandinavia.

A lonely damsel imprisoned within a castle or convent cell. The eavesdropping of a prisoner next door. The framed image of a woman with a sinister past. These familiar tropes from 1790s novels and tales exploded onto the English literary scene in 'low-brow' titles of Gothic romance. Surprisingly, however, they also re-emerged as features of major Victorian poems from the 1830s to 1870s. Such signature tropes - inquisitional overhearing; female confinement and the damsel in distress; supernatural switches between living and dead bodies - were transfigured into poetic forms that we recognise and teach today as canonically Victorian. The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry identifies a poetics of Gothic enclosure constitutive of high Victorian poetry that came to define key nineteenth-century poetic forms, from the dramatic monologue, to women's sonnet sequences and metasonnets, to Pre-Raphaelite picture poems.