I’m envisioning this course as both a lightning tour through most “major” (and some “minor”) Victorian poets, and an attempt to theorize the insistently pictorial quality of their poetry. Topics will include: the picturesque poetry of Tennyson, as well as his illustrated Moxon editions, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s debt to Italian art, Robert Browning’s theorizing of poetry via Italian painting, the development of the dramatic monologue as a form of prosopopoeia, the Pre-Raphaelite pairing of painting and poetry in Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, the poetry and visual design of William Morris, the visual theory of Pater and its effect on the poetry of Swinburne, Hopkins’ inscape and the ekphrastic poetry of poet collaborators Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (known as Michael Field). Longer poems will include Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, selections from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and selections from Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. Visual theory may include readings from Carol Christ, Laura Mulvey, Jonathan Crary, and W. J. T. Mitchell. Grading parameters: discussion, one presentation and a seminar paper. |
