The Female Enthusiast Revived: Poetic Lineage in Aurora Leigh

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-289
Author(s):  
Rachael Isom
Keyword(s):  
Aurora Leigh

Epic and Novel

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Big Picture

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.

scholarly journals Revolutionary Poetic Voices of Victorian Period: A Comparative Study between Elizabeth Barrette Browning and Christina Rossetti

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
Jannatul Farhana
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Christina Rossetti ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Goblin Market ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
New Form ◽  
Female Poets ◽  
Independent Thinking

<p>This article is an attempt to provide a comparative study between Elizabeth Barrette Browning and Christina Rossetti, two famous authors in the Victorian period. As the first female poet Browning throws a challenge by dismantling and mingling the form of epic and novel in her famous creation <em>Aurora Leigh. </em>This epic structurally and thematically offers a new form that questions the contemporary prejudices about women. Being influenced and inspired by Browning, Rossetti shows her mastery on sonnets in <em>Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets</em>. Diversity in the themes of her poem allows Rossetti to demonstrate her intellect and independent thinking, which represents the cultural dilemma of Victorian women. Though Browning is addressed as the ‘first female poet’ and the pioneer of revolutionary female poets, her <em>Aurora Leigh </em>recognizes and celebrates the success of a female poet in that period but at the same time acknowledges the importance of traditional romance as well as marriage union at the end of the poem. On the other hand, in <em>Mona Innominata, </em>Rossetti mingles the traditional idea of romance with High Anglican belief to establish and uphold the position of women in the society as an individual and self sufficient one. She is the first poet in Victorian period who boldly denies the dominance of men in a woman’s life by celebrating sisterhood in her another famous work <em>Goblin Market</em>. Though Browning and Rossetti belong to the same period, Rossetti is quite advanced than Browning in terms of experimenting with forms, themes and breaking the conventions of Victorian era.</p>

The Epic Tradition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isobel Hurst
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Criticism ◽  
Epic Tradition ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Daunting Challenge ◽  
Idylls Of The King

Epic occupied a prominent position as the highest test of poetic genius, yet any poet imprudent enough to attempt an epic would be faced with a daunting challenge. For a Victorian poet the attempt to rival Homer or Virgil involved complex considerations of form, theme, and history. The genre was traditionally associated with heroism and masculine strength, mythology, and the shaping of national identity, religion, and war, and with the poet’s own desire to compete with and surpass his predecessors much as epic heroes seek to prove their own supremacy. The reception of ancient epic was an ongoing concern in the period, since Homer in particular was cited as a model in literature, politics, and morality. Matthew Arnold’s prescriptions for translating Homer conveyed a sense of the responsibility involved in disseminating classical texts to a new readership. The Iliad was appropriated in debates on divorce, masculinity, authorship, and the historical criticism of the Bible. The Odyssey offered an alternative, novelistic version of Homeric epic, one which prioritized domesticity and highlighted the poem’s female characters. Some of the most influential creative responses to the epic tradition were not poems in twelve or twenty-four books but verse novels, dramatic monologues, or theatrical burlesques. Others took up the challenge of writing at epic length and addressing national concerns. For aspiring epic poets, there were many choices to be made: should poetry inhabit a mythological world, whether Arthurian (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King or Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse) or Norse (William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung), or a contemporary domain like that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh? Might the epic be used to intervene in religious controversies or political conflicts such as Chartism? Could a modern poet be the Virgil of the British Empire? Facing strong competition from the novel, ambitious Victorian poets chose to approach such questions and an astonishing range of themes in a form which evoked vast expanses of time and space, extraordinary physical and intellectual achievement, and literary renown. Yet to achieve recognition as an epic poet remains an unusual distinction. Despite recent critical attention to the proliferation of Victorian poems with epic aspirations, a small number of poems by Tennyson, Barrett Browning, and William Morris have continued to dominate accounts of the genre.

‘Your Fourier’s Failed’

2018 ◽  
pp. 274-297
Author(s):  
Eric Hood
Keyword(s):  
Nodal Point ◽  
Psychological Needs ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
George Sand ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Charles Fourier ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Verse Novel

This chapter traces the affective forces at work in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s representation of utopian socialist Charles Fourier in Aurora Leigh (1855).  In Barrett Browning’s verse-novel, “Fourier” operates as a sign mediated by networks of affect, referring not only to the political struggles surrounding socialism in the 1850s but also to Barrett Browning’s personal psychoanalytic conflicts against both her father and her own queer desires (particularly, for George Sand).  Thus, “Fourier” functions as a nodal point in Aurora Leigh where a political crisis and the author’s individual psychological needs meet to produce a dismissal of the economic and social alternatives that were available at that historical moment and the forms of queer identity that challenged the heteronormative, liberal order.

Introduction to Aurora Leigh *

2017 ◽  
pp. 69-82
Author(s):  
Cora Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Aurora Leigh
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