Overview

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation argues that the dialectic and dynamic relationship between the periodical review and poetry creates a culture of evaluation which shapes Victorian poetic form. The mediation of poetry by the periodical review orients poets towards public readership and reception, heightening their self-consciousness about their audience and generating a poetics of publicness. Using methodologies associated with historical poetics and new formalism, the book examines the dialogues between poets and periodical reviews from the 1830s to the 1860s. It juxtaposes male and female poets and canonical and uncanonical texts. Challenging the critical binaries of fame and celebrity, the culture of evaluation posits a new way of reading Victorian poetry. It illuminates poets' engagement with the immediacy and inevitability of writing for the present and for the contemporary media through which poetry was read and disseminated. New patterns of reception were created by mass print culture and both poets and reviewers were preoccupied with reaching the newly constituted mass audience. The changes to the material forms of poetry (e.g. through the periodical or gift-book) and the subjection to the commercial imperatives of the literary marketplace encouraged bold experiment with verse. The book identifies three poetic strategies for articulating the preoccupation with a mass audience and the demands of mass media: voice, style and address. Chapters on voice, style, and address explore the development of poetic form in dialogue with periodical reviews.

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9780198856108

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Reviews

While the impressionistic vagueness of Victorian reviewing seldom prompts us to take it as a serious repository of poetic theory, Dawson's study encourages us to look again. It helps us to see once again how Victorian poets could develop formal solutions to social or institutional problems. In particular, Dawson illuminates figures of aesthetic value that were shared between poems and reviews - figures that crystalize notable Victorian ideas about poetry's worth and reach. In this thoughtful and stimulating work of scholarship, Dawson enriches our understanding of Victorian poetry and print-culture alike. * Justin A. Sider, Review 19 *

Author Information

Clara Dawson is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Manchester.

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