Outsiders Looking In

The Rossettis Then and Now

Edited by David Clifford, Laurence Roussillon

Publication date:

29 January 2004

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

234x155mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781843311058

This new interdisciplinary collection of writing explores the achievements of the Rossettis in the context of the Victorian era and in the light of modern cultural and literary criticism. 'Outsiders Looking In' considers the position that the Anglo-Italian Rossettis occupied in the cultural melee of mid-Victorian London, a status that was both central and fringe owing to their dual nationality.

List of Illustrations; Ackonowledgements; Contributors; Introduction; PART I: Italy and Italianness: 1. Sibling Cultures; 2. William Michael and Lucy Rossetti: Outsider Insiders - The True Cosmopolitans; PART II. Aesthetics in a Commercial World: 3. The Taxman and the Aesthete: the Canon according to William Michael Rossetti; 4. Copyright and Control: Christina Rossetti and her Publishers; 5. Recollections PB Shelley: William Michael Rossetti, Political Commitment and Literary Capital; PART III. Faith in an Age of Science: 6. Pews, Periodicals and Politics: The Rossetti Women as High Church Controversialists; 7. A Sort of Aesthetico-Catholic Revival: Christina Rossetti and the London Ritualist Scene; 8. In the Footsteps of His Father? Dantean Allegory in Gabriele Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; 9. Mystic, Madwoman or Metaphysician? The Analogical Theodicy of Christina Rossetti; 10. Christina's Challenge to Victorian Mentality: the Parodic, Unconventional Pattern of 'My Dream'; PART IV. Radical Poetics: 11. DG Rossetti and the Art of the Inner Standing Point; 12. Maundering Medievalism: Dante Gabriele Rossetti and William Morris's Poetry; 13. The Aesthetics of Morbidity: DG Rossetti and Buchanan's The Fleshly School of Poetry; PART V. Literary Tradition and the Rossetti Legacy: 14. 'It Once Should Save as well as Kill': DG Rossetti and the Feminine; 15. Pursuing the Well-Beloved: Thomas Hardy, Jocelyn Pearston and the School of Rossetti; 16. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Poetic Daughters: Fin de Siècle Women Poets and the Sonnet; Selected Bibliography

'This is a satisfying collection in which all the essays present original material which helps shed light on English culture in the nineteenth century.' —'The Burlington Magazine'