Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology

Abstract

Bringing together the critical strategies of both his new historicism and intertextual analysis, Poets and Romantic Poems questions the ideological operations of Victorian poems and the ideological dispositions of their authors, particularly in relation to Romantic presurcursors and pre-texts. By examining the works of eight Victorian poets - Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Morris, and A.C. Swinburne - Harrison demonstrates how the ideologies of Victorian poets are revealed by their self-consciously intertextual uses of precursors.