Algernon Charles Swinburne

Unofficial Laureate

Edited by Catherine Maxwell, Stefano Evangelista

Publication date:

11 January 2013

Length of book:

272 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

216x138mm

ISBN-13: 9780719086250

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), dramatist, novelist and critic, was late Victorian England’s unofficial Poet Laureate. Swinburne was admired by his contemporaries for his technical brilliance, his facility with classical and medieval forms, and his courage in expressing his sensual, erotic imagination. He was one of the most important Victorian poets, the founding figure for British aestheticism, and the dominant influence for fin-de-siècle and many modernist poets. This collection of eleven new essays by leading international scholars offers a thorough revaluation of this fascinating and complex figure. It situates him in the light of current critical work on cosmopolitanism, politics, form, Victorian Hellenism, gender and sexuality, the arts, and aestheticism and its contested relation to literary modernism. The essays in this collection reassess Swinburne’s work and reconstruct his vital and often provocative contribution to the Victorian cultural debate.

Introduction – Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista
Cultural Discourse
1. Swinburne’s French voice: cosmopolitanism and cultural mediation in aesthetic criticism – Stefano Evangelista
2. Swinburne’s swimmers: from insular peace to the Anglo-Boer War – Julia F. Saville
3. Swinburne: a nineteenth-century Hellene? – Charlotte Ribeyrol
4. ‘A juggler’s trick’? Swinburne and journalism 1857–75 – Laurel Brake
Form
5. Metrical discipline: Algernon Swinburne on ‘The Flogging Block’ – Yopie Prins
6. What goes around: A Century of Roundels – Herbert Tucker
7. Desire lines: Swinburne and lyric crisis – Marion Thain
Influence
8. ‘Good Satan’: the unlikely poetic affinity of Swinburne and Christina Rossetti – Dinah Roe
9. Parleying with Robert Browning: Swinburne’s aestheticism, blasphemy, and the dramatic monologue – Sara Lyons
10. Whose muse? Sappho, Swinburne, and Amy Lowell – Sarah Parker
11. Atmosphere and absorption: Swinburne, Eliot, Drinkwater – Catherine Maxwell
Index

Candid, ambitious and sympathetic, this is a confident and often eloquent volume on a writer who keeps resisting the explanations that we are told best account for him. Immaculately edited, it earns its place among the best of modern writing in Algernon Charles Swinburne - poet and enigma.
Francis O'Gorman, Times Literary Supplement, Mischief and other minds, 10/01/2014

|It encourages those interested in Swinburne's work to read him in many different ways and take part in the effort of mapping his vast poetic and critical corpus.

, Yisrael Levin, English Literature in Transition 1880 - 1920, 2014

'The chapters provide an enriching blend of perspectives that, to varying degrees, pivot on the ways ‘sexuality itself might help shape, inform, or condition style, poetics, and other aspects of literary practice’. The essays collected in Unofficial Laureate… will be of immense benefit to students, experts, and dilettantes of Swinburne. They are set to cast a long shadow, to galvanize and update Swinburne studies, reigniting the slow-burning interest in this underrated Victorian poet and his work.'
Kostas Boyiopoulos, Durham University