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 study is a reading of Robert Browning as an ironist in the tradition of the German Romanticist Friedrich Schlegel, who coined the term "Romantic irony." Specifically, Patricia Diane Rigg considers historicity or historical truth in Browning's The Ring and the Book by distinguishing between the processes of representation and re-presentation within the context of Romantic irony.

Accessibly written throughout, this guidebook covers biographical details, information on the historical and social contexts of Browning's work, an overview of the full range of his work and a survey of the major critical debates surrounding him and his work.

Volume 15 in The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning presents poetry Browning wrote in his seventies, his last two volumes: Parleyings (1887) and Asolando (1889). The former is the poet's last sustained meditation on life and on his times, a nine-section credo covering religion, history, poetry, politics, art, and music. Asolando is a coda to his whole oeuvre, a mixture of short love lyrics, historical monologues and anecdotes, light verse, and poems which are quite sui generis, all grouped around the theme of 'fancies and fact'. Both volumes are presented here with previously unknown sources, a wealth of new contextual material, and many textual nuances clarified, giving a fresh view of the last phase of Browning's career. What emerges is a poet more seriously Christian, Protestant, and Liberal than previously supposed, more interested in Britain's destiny and Empire, more enmeshed in the local battles of the 1880s?and a writer of considerable range and wit.

Much has been written about Browning & how he came to write "The Ring & the Book." Miss Snitslaar analyzes the poem both in the light of what is known about Browning's background & against the social background of the period Browning was writing about.