Developing a perspective on Victorian culture as the breeding ground for early theories of the psyche, this title offers a reading of the Victorian siblings' literature and visual arts. It views poems and artworks such as Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel" and "Venus Verticordia."

Analyzes the Victorian conception of both demonic and divine nature of women in Victorian art and literature.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelite extraordinaire, is unique as Victorian proto-expressionistic painter-poet, who relentlessly sought representation of a tormented personified-self through the communicative relationship between image and word. In this interdisciplinary study is considered the narrative interaction that unifies ideas and forms into a self-expressive dialectical that informs of autonomous individualism and gender politics as a social problematic. Rossetti, known universally as a charismatic and vibrantly passionate man, is tangibly revealed in the most tenderly transparent narratives to be a haunted and socially subjugated man who searched for self-definition as a man and as an artist. By an intricate analysis of key textual and visual narratives Yildiz Kilic provides an insightful and wholly original interpretation of Rossetti as Victorian victim and innovator.

Nineteenth-century ghost literature by women shows the Gothic becoming more experimental and subversive as its writers abandoned the stereotypical Gothic heroines of the past in order to create more realistic, middle-class characters (both living and dead, male and female) who rage against the limits imposed on them by the natural world. The ghosts of Female Gothic thereby become reflections of the social, sexual, economic and racial troubles of the living. Expanding the parameters of Female Gothic and moving it into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries allows us to recognise women’s ghost literature as a specific strain of the Female Gothic that began not with Ann Radcliffe, but with the Romantic Gothic ballads of women in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

Hair, or lack of it, is one the most significant identifiers of individuals in any society. In Antiquity, the power of hair to send a series of social messages was no different. This volume covers nearly a thousand years of history, from Archaic Greece to the end of the Roman Empire, concentrating on what is now Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Among the key issues identified by its authors is the recognition that in any given society male and female hair tend to be opposites (when male hair is generally short, women's is long); that hair is a marker of age and stage of life (children and young people have longer, less confined hairstyles; adult hair is far more controlled); hair can be used to identify the 'other' in terms of race and ethnicity but also those who stand outside social norms such as witches and mad women. The chapters in A Cultural History of Hair in Antiquity cover the following topics: religion and ritualized belief, self and society, fashion and adornment, production and practice, health and hygiene, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class and social status, and cultural representations.

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.

Explains how the study of poetry, by providing experiences similar to those produced by poetry therapy, can help students discover themselves and develop their potential to effect change in the world.

This newly revised study examines thematic elements in Christina Rossettis poetry in order to celebrate and explain an important, undervalued writer and her remarkable artistic quest to achieve an original voice. Critics rightly applaud Rossettis metrical craftsmanship and song-like lyrical phrasings, but over-attention to formal felicities can impede proper interpretation of content. Through detailed readings of selected poems, this book demonstrates that Rossettis rigorously controlled use of language and innovative symbolism combine to create radical, hidden inter-textual levels of meaning beyond those attainable via biographical decoding, making her a singular bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. From earliest secular interactions with Romantic and Tractarian thought, through Goblin Market (1862) and The Princes Progress (1866), Rossettis verse resists straightforward interpretation by subtly interrogating and subverting the patriarchal traditions of writing that it simultaneously extends: love lyric, fairy tale, quest myth, and sonnet. Persuasively constructing a case for the inability of male-ordained poetics to cope with the expression of active female identity, Monna Innominata (1881) deconstructs lyric tradition, casting together medieval, renaissance, Romantic and Victorian ideologies. This groundbreaking sonnet cycle disturbs poetic conventions and forms the most concentrated, sustained demonstration of the struggle to articulate the female self to be found in Rossettis oeuvre, perhaps in literary history. The painful sense of irresolution and despair pervading Monna Innominata sheds important light upon Christina Rossettis exclusive production of devotional literature during her final years.