The poet's reputation has weathered even the most vitriolic attempts to discredit both the man and his writings; and as criticism of the late twentieth century demonstrates, Tennyson's claim to pre-eminence among the Victorians is now unchallenged."

How did literary aestheticism emerge in Victorian Britain, with its competing models of religious doubt and visions of secularisation? For Lyons, the aestheticism developed and progressively revised by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) and Walter Pater (1839-1894) illuminates the contradictory impulses of modern secularism: on the one hand, a desire to cast itself as a form of neutrality or disinterestedness; on the other, a desire to affirm 'this world' as the place of human flourishing or even enchantment. The standard narrative of a 'crisis of faith' does not do justice to the fissured, uncertain quality of Victorian visions of secularisation. Precisely because it had the status of a confusing hypothesis rather than a self-evident reality, it provoked not only dread and melancholia, but also forms of fantasy. Within this context Lyons gives a fundamentally new account of the aims and nature of Victorian aestheticism, taking as a focus its deceptively simple claim that art is for art's sake first of all.

The Lost Girls analyses a number of British writers between 1850 and 1930 for whom the myth of Demeter's loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers – Mary Webb and Mary Butts – who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and especially in Butts's case to recover and restore a forgotten legacy, the myth of matriarchal origins. These novelists are placed in relation not only to one another but also to Victorian archaeologists and especially to Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), one of the first women to distinguish herself in the history of British Classical scholarship and whose anthropological approach to the study of early Greek art and religion both influenced – and became transformed by – the literature. Rather than offering a teleological argument that moves lock-step through the decades,The Lost Girls proposes chapters that detail specific engagements with Demeter-Persephone through which to register distinct literary-cultural shifts in uses of the myth and new insights into the work of particular writers.

Conflating deconstructive theory with psychoanalysis, Rowlinson (English, Dartmouth College) proposes an analytic formalism as the appropriate model for reading Tennyson, and demonstrates the utility of the approach with close readings of fragments and poems written from 1824 to 1833, focusing on the nature of place the structuring of desire. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was one of the literary sensations of the Victorian period. His iconoclastic poetry and prose challenged attitudes to sex, politics, religion and censorship. Not only writing some of the most original lyric poetry of the time and pioneering criticism, Swinburne became a cultural icon. In the 1860s his very name was a symbol of progressive forces emerging in a repressive age. Readers across the world identified with the paganism and humanism of his poetry. Swinburne's was a turbulent life lived against a backdrop of beautiful settings in the Isle of Wight and Northumberland, and shared with a host of Victorian luminaries, or artists and writers such as D G Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Burne-Jones, Morris and Simeon Solomon. It is a life touched by early tragedy and romantic disappointment, by extraordinary fame and abject loneliness, by masochism and alcoholism, but above all by an unquenchable vivacity. At the centre was the charmingly spoken, excitable genius whom Burne-Jones described as 'quite the most poetic personality I have ever known.' the artistic prodigy who seemed to have read almost everything, who was as happy revelling in the sea as in literary discourse. Based on new research and many unpublished letters, Rikky Rooksby sheds light on Swinburne's personality and relationships, and discusses how Swinburne's poetry develops from early pessimism to a recovered joy in the energies of the natural world. This biography is a sympathetic and fresh account of one of the most colourful figures in English literature.

In this richly detailed study, Margot Louis combines close readings of Swinburne's poetry with a wide-ranging analysis of the pressures which influenced the poet. Louis not only examines the ways in which Swinburne was affected by English and French Romantics but comments on the powerful impact on his writing of a childhood steeped in high church theology. Swinburne's ideas of alternative concepts of deity are discussed within the context of nineteenth-century radical "free thought." Louis reflects on the depth and diversity of Swinburne's intellectual interests and their effect on the development of his poetic style.

This important collection of essays both contributes to the expanding field of classical reception studies and seeks to extend it. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, it looks at a range of different genres (epic, novel, lyric, tragedy, political pamphlet). Within the published texts considered, the usual range of genres dealt with elsewhere is extended by chapters on books for children, and those in which childhood and memories of childhood are informed by antiquity; and also by a multi-genre case study of a highly unusual subject, Spartacus. "Remaking the Classics" also goes beyond books to dramatic performance, and beyond the theatre to radio - a medium of enormous power and influence from the 1920s to the 1960s, whose role in the reception of classics is largely unexplored. The variety of genres and of media considered in the book is balanced both by the focus on Britain in a specific time period, and by an overlap of subject-matter between chapters: the three chapters on twentieth-century drama, for example, range from performance strategies to post-colonial contexts.The book thus combines the consolidation of a field with an attempt to push it in new and exciting directions.

Arthur O'Shaughnessy's career as a natural historian in the British Museum, and his consequent preoccupation with the role of work in his life, provides the context with which to reexamine his contributions to Victorian poetry. O'Shaughnessy's engagement with aestheticism, socialism, and Darwinian theory can be traced to his career as a Junior Assistant at the British Museum, and his perception of the burden of having to earn a living outside of art. Making use of extensive archival research, Jordan Kistler demonstrates that far from being merely a minor poet, O'Shaughnessy was at the forefront of later Victorian avant-garde poetry. Her analyses of published and unpublished writings, including correspondence, poetic manuscripts, and scientific notebooks, demonstrate O'Shaughnessy's importance to the cultural milieu of the 1870s, particularly his contributions to English aestheticism, his role in the importation of decadence from France, and his unique position within contemporary debates on science and literature.