This chapter considers poetry of the 1870s in the aftermath of the previous boom decade in magazine verse, with the flowering of shilling monthlies and popular literary weeklies, when periodical publishers became firmly established as the era’s primary poetry publishers, and when most readers accessed poems in ephemeral print. Literary accounts of the Victorian era conventionally consider poetry book publication as defining the era’s poetics, and certainly in the 1870s there were no shortage of prominent poetry volumes. But this decade also saw poetry defined in relation to magazine verse, and the value of poetry was integral to associated issues of ephemerality and modernity. This chapter focuses in particular on the place of poetry in two new periodicals of the 1870s: The Dark Blue and The Nineteenth Century.

This chapter explores the potential of Construction Grammar for analyzing literary texts. First, it investigates typical features of literary language from a constructional point of view. Fairy tales, for example, are characterized by their opening lines like “Once upon a time …,” analyzed as a concrete, complex construction. Similarly, many authors, styles, and genres are characterized by particular constructions, or the use of particular words and phrases. The second section deals with creative, innovative, and seemingly ‘rule-breaking’ language in a constructional framework, suggesting that Construction Grammar as a usage-based and cognitively plausible model offers the perfect toolkit to analyze seemingly unruly linguistic behavior. The third part deals with literary genres as linguistic units beyond the sentence, arguing that literary texts are also learned form–meaning pairings and can be treated as constructions. Genres as constructions may change dynamically over time and be subject to prototypeeffects. Drawing on numerous examples, this chapter thus demonstrates that literary language and texts can be productively analyzed using concepts and methods of Construction Grammar.

This chapter argues that, throughout the 1870s, literary understandings of voice were transformed by, and also helped to shape, acoustic technologies and sciences. Developments in physics and physiology, and the invention of the telephone and the phonograph at the decade’s end, offered new ways of describing how the human voice was formed, transmitted, and heard. However, these developments also reimagined voice as something not exclusively human, continuous with a wide spectrum of inarticulate and non-human sounds. This dehumanisation threatened to undermine established definitions of literary voice, but literary and scientific writers also identified similarities between their respective theorisations of speech and sound, and ‘voice’ became a keyword that was frequently used to examine the wider relations between science and literature. After discussing George Eliot’s views on the possible implications of new vocal technologies for prose fiction, the chapter turns to the sonnets of Emily Pfeiffer, which examine how scientific models of voice might complicate and reimagine poetry’s conventional status as the most essentially vocal of literary forms.

Literary historians have long envisioned the 1870s as a turning point in the invention of a specifically Victorian literary age only because they have taken American Edmund Clarence Stedman at his word. Treating his Victorian Poets (1875) as an unprecedented critical project responsible for popularizing, even introducing, the very adjective Victorian, such historians have — by extension — interpreted the latter as a primarily literary term always already suggesting inadequacy and obsolescence. Considering the evolution of Stedman’s work over time and for different audiences, and in relation to earlier and later critical efforts including George L. Craik’s Compendious History of English Literature (1861) and Alfred Austin’s The Poetry of the Period (1870), this chapter offers a fuller, more nuanced account of the role of the 1870s in consolidating a Victorian age and a Victorian literature, partly by demonstrating how Stedman’s account worked to assert America’s primacy in a contested transatlantic field.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper work has helped reshape Civil War literary studies and illustrates the field’s larger preoccupations. This chapter centers on “Bury Me in a Free Land,” a poem that demonstrates the craft of a writer uniquely adept at using and subverting expectations in a literature that was highly conventional, thus illustrating for contemporary readers both the patterns and their breach. Harper’s poem speaks to the core preoccupations that scholars have been tracing as they identify an ever-broadening archive of Civil War literature, namely the importance of slavery and abolition, the role of death and suffering in the context of spirituality and sentimentality, the shifting understandings of race and gender, and the exploration of how the conflict would be remembered. Poetry was the period’s predominant genre, and this example points to current scholarly interest in works that are ephemeral, conventional, and written to appeal to a broad popular audience. Instead of asking what great works of literature writers in general and combatants in particular produced, as previous scholars had done, recent inquiries have considered a greater diversity of writers and taken an expansive approach to this large question: What is Civil War literature, and what cultural, social, and political contributions did it make?

One trend in recent nineteenth-century American studies has been the rising critical status of poetry, which has gone from being widely neglected by C19 scholars to being a vibrant and diverse field of scholarship. Yet, while this scholarship has recovered major authors and recuperated long-derided aspects of nineteenth-century poetics, it has also maintained an old narrative about C19 poetry, namely that the status of poetry declined during the postbellum period. The career of William Cullen Bryant is emblematic of these trends: while there has been some fascinating recent work on his poetry, it has been informed exclusively by his early poetry of the 1810s and 1820s. This essay argues that Bryant’s career looks different when viewed from the end, rather than the beginning. In so doing, it revises recent critical accounts of Bryant, and C19 American poetry more broadly, by examining his translation of the Iliad, which he published in 1870. Bryant’s Iliad was one of the most celebrated poems of the postbellum era and was considered his masterpiece by contemporary readers. This essay examines the translation and discuss some of the ways in which it engages the politics and poetics of the Reconstruction period

Chapter 1 examines John Gay’s Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), offering an account of its distinctive form of mobility and spectatorship and its meditation on poetry’s relationship to commerce. It situates Trivia within a number of early eighteenth-century accounts of London, including Ned Ward’s monthly periodical The London Spy (1698-1700), Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (1700), and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s periodicals The Tatler (1709–10) and The Spectator (1711–14) – works which were themselves influenced by various sources including character books, Renaissance coney-catching books, and Alain René Le Sage’s Diable Boiteux (1707). Together, the works examined here offer important models for urban mobility that would be influential to writers and artists throughout the period under discussion.

Máire ní Fhlathúin considers how colonial narratives circulate in India, and how they intersect with British power. We read of the East India Company’s annexation of the state of Awadh in 1856, and the outbreak of revolt that brought about the Government of India Act’s transfer of powers from the East India Company to the British Crown in 1858, precipitating a massive mobilisation of British soldiers and their families to India. Ní Fhlathúin revitalises this familiar story by examining contemporary para-literary texts and poetry published in British Indian newspapers and periodicals during and immediately after the rebellion. Much of this material is newly available, and enables us to gain a more holistic view of events across the subcontinent. This broad range of texts and writers bears witness to the inherent instability of British representations of its Empire, and exposes the shaping influence of the British imagination on accounts of India

Hopkins developed an ecological poetics informed by evolutionary theory, energy physics, and Catholic theology, bearing witness to local devastations of an unsustainable Victorian global economy. His sensitivity to such degradation was heightened by exposure to a range of polluted regions and by the effort to convey poetically his embodied perception of environmental features and patterns. His poems present everything from flashing bird wings, to waves, to wheat fields as dynamically interrelated through the flow of energy, and therefore vulnerable to its squandering by human industry. Such waste is both ecologically and spiritually self-destructive for Hopkins, given that Christ is incarnate in every fibre and force of the material world. His later sonnet ‘Ribblesdale’ manifests these concerns by lamenting a river valley poisoned and denuded by globally destructive industry and industrialized agriculture, even as it affirms vulnerable, accountable membership in a wounded terrestrial body that is divinely indwelt.

This chapter argues that Imagist poetry participates in the historical process of finance capital by developing the semiotics for a new form of value: affective intensity. Pound’s and H. D.’s Imagist poetry renders the raw moment of impact between bodies, which provides the foundation for affective experience, as an object of poetic study, literary representation, and semiotic problem to be solved. Therefore, Imagism, along with philosophical and commercial endeavors during this time period, lays the groundwork for affect to emerge as a value form in literature and as a site of social, economic, and cultural struggle under twentieth-century capitalist structures of power.

This chapter provides an overview of twentieth- and twenty-first-century explorations of poetic form, with a focus on late Imperial and early Soviet Modernism. Rebelling against nineteenth-century norms, Modernist poets sought to devise a poetic idiom more in tune with their era of rapid cultural, political, and technological change. The rich and diverse poetic output of this period did not simply reject the limits imposed by formal convention. Rather, it expanded them, experimenting with metrical forms as well as the visual and sonic shape of the poem to uncover the particular qualities of poetic language. The chapter also considers the effect of shifting social circumstances on poetry, and particularly the new forms it took as it addressed mass audiences. The final part of the chapter traces the resonance of Modernist experiments in later Soviet poetry and the continued importance attached to form in the work of contemporary poets.

This chapter provides an introduction to Russian literature in the Modernist and avant-garde period, stretching from about 1890 to 1930. This period was one of extraordinary experimentation in Russian literature and the chapter outlines the differences between the key movements that emerged and their leading practitioners, including Symbolism (Aleksandr Blok), Futurism (Vladimir Maiakovskii, Velimir Khlebnikov), and Acmeism (Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam). It highlights the inextricable links between literature and politics in this period, especially following the Revolution of 1917, which saw the Bolsheviks take power and establish the Soviet Union. While the early 1920s witnessed a genuine debate among writers about what the new Soviet literature would look like, this diversity vanished by the end of the decade as centralisation took hold. By the 1930s, Socialist Realism had become the only approved official aesthetic. The chapter concludes with remarks about the Modernists’ legacy within and beyond Russia.

Both Collingwood and Wittgenstein link philosophy with poetry. Collinwood thought that “good philosophy and good poetry are not two different kinds of writing, but one,” while Wittgenstein wrote that “philosophy ought to be written only as a poetic composition.” In this chapter, I present what these two philosophers say about the relation between philosophy and poetry and argue that, their differences notwithstanding, both want philosophers to express their times, just like poets, and lead their audience to the future in a process of self-knowledge and reform. Finally, I comment on Richard Rorty’s remarks on the relation between philosophy and poetry. I argue that, unlike Collingwood and Wittgenstein, Rorty wants poetry to replace, and perhaps even eliminate, philosophy, but agrees with them and Nietzsche that poets ought to act as prophets, not in the sense of foretellers, but in the sense of inspiring leaders and groundbreakers.

This chapter endeavors to explain Heidegger’s intertwined thinking about death and “the nothing” and explore the ontological significance of this connection. As we have seen, “death” (Tod) is Heidegger’s name for a stark and desolate phenomenon in which Dasein (that is, our world-disclosive “being-here”) encounters its own end, the end “most proper” to the distinctive kind of entity that Dasein is. Being and Time’s phenomenology of death is primarily concerned to understand Dasein’s death ontologically. Heidegger is asking what the phenomenon of our own individual deaths reveals to us all about the nature of our common human being, that is, our Dasein (and what that discloses, in turn, about the nature of being in general). Understood ontologically, “death” designates Dasein’s encounter with the end of its own world-disclosure, the end of that particular way of becoming intelligible in time that uniquely “distinguishes” Dasein from all other kinds of entities (BT 32/SZ 12).

Remarkably, literature was the field where Darwinian thinking was immediately and warmly received. Charles Dickens’s weekly magazine, All the Year Round, at once published articles that gave detailed, sympathetic accounts of the theory of the Origin, and these were followed by writers using Darwinian themes in their fiction and poetry, Dickens himself using sexual selection to structure a key relationship in Our Mutual Friend. This continues to the present, when leading novelists like Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson use very different reactions to Darwin to mold their narratives.