Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture: Discourse and Ideology

Abstract

This volume examines poetry as a significant force in the construction of English culture from 1837 to about 1900. In chapters focusing on Victorian mediaevalist discourse, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold and Christina Rossetti, the author looks at a range of Victorian poems in order to show the cultural work they accomplish. He illuminates, for example, such culturally prominent Victorian mythologies as the exaltation of motherhood, the Romantic appropriation of transcendent art, and the idealization of the gypsy as a culturally alient, exotic Other.