General materials.

Pionke, Albert D.

Five books are featured in the general materials section. The first three are collections with varying degrees of investment in Victorian poetry. Together, they provide a set of conceptual, tropological, and material contexts within which to interpret a wide range of canonical and lesser-known Victorian poets. The two monographs reviewed here reconnect Victorian poetry with the complex process of its translation and with one popular form of its publication.

Chapter two from Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon's coedited Evolution and Victorian Culture (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014), John Holmes's "The Challenge of Evolution in Victorian Poetry," should be of particular interest to general materials readers. After briefly establishing a genealogy for the study of evolution in Victorian poetry that reaches back to the 1930s, the chapter proceeds in three sections: "Evolution in Victorian poetry before the Origin" finds in Arthur Hugh Clough's Ambawtlia (1849) and Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) a preemptive articulation of "the anxieties faced by [later] poets encountering evolution through Darwin and the inferences they drew about it" (p. 42); among the later poets touched upon in "Evolution, faith and nature in Victorian poetry" are Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Meredith, Lewis Morris, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Tennyson, and James Thomson; finally, "Evolution, politics and society: Social Darwinism in Victorian poetry" briefly surveys engagements with Herbert Spencer and others in selected poems by Robert Bridges, Wilfred Seawen Blunt, May Kendall, Meredith, Constance Naden, William Michael Rossetti, Swinburne, and Tennyson. By Holmes's account, "there are few signs that evolution was a prominent idea in Victorian poetry until the 1860s," after which evolution became "the defining feature of the cosmology that Victorian poets in particular took it as their responsibility to interpret" (p. 42, p. 59). He concludes by positing the effects of evolutionary ideas on the form of Victorian poetry--with In Memoriam, Modern Love (1862), and The City of Dreadful Night (1874) as touchstones--and offering suggestions for future research.

Whether as a site for the collection of natural historical specimens or the observation of eroded geological strata, the beach offered Victorians a readily accessible space in which to observe the processes of evolution in action. The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures: Reading Littoral Space (Ashgate, 2015), edited by Ursula Kluwick and Virginia Richter, includes such scientific possibilities among its broader approach to "the beach as a creative trope and a socio-cultural site, as well as an aesthetically productive topography" (p. 2). Of most interest for readers of Victorian Poetry are the volume's first two chapters, Christiana Payne's "Visions of the Beach in Victorian Britain" and Katharina Rennhak's "Dover Beach and the Politics and Poetics of Perspective." Although primarily interested in four mid-Victorian paintings of seascapes and coastal scenes, Payne acknowledges the "close relationship between visual and verbal imaginings" in the period, citing Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" and "Break, break, break," Arnold's "Dover Beach," Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine," and Kingsley's "The Three Fishers" as evidence for the Victorians' consistent deployment of beach imagery in connection with poetic meditations on human mortality (p. 21). Rennhak focuses more particularly on several "poems about Dover from around 1800 until the early twenty-first century" that "establish a recurring 'Dover beach' trope which--by drawing on a number of recurring topoi--negotiates the question of human agency" (p. 49). Centering her discussion on Arnold's poetic touchstone of "Victorian liberal humanism," Rennhak eschews the other examples of beach poetry cited by Payne in favor of texts by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, William John Courthope, William Lisle Bowles, Iain Crichton Smith, and Daljit Nagra (p. 37).

Linked tropologically by the beach, even conceptually by the limits of human freedom, the poems and poets discussed by Payne and Rennak begin to suggest a virtual network of the sort informing Veronica Alfano and Andrew Stauffer's Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). According to Stauffer's Introduction, "As time and technology make plain that our Victorian period will henceforth always be a simulation or constructed model, we can investigate more assiduously those networks of remediation.... At the same time, we are able to see more clearly the era's own immersion in virtuality, both optical and textual, as a result of its own novel technologies and networks" (p. 1). The first of four essays in the collection to take up this challenge with respect to Victorian poetry specifically is Catherine Robson's "How We Search Now: New and Old Ways of Digging Up Wolfe's 'Sir John Moore,'" a self-conscious reconstruction of her own "newfangled and oldfangled" research methods for unearthing the "subterranean Wolfian traces" of "The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna" (1817) in British chaplains' memoires of the two Anglo-Boer Wars and World War I (p. 13, p. 23). Also focused on processes of textual circulation, replication, and reception, Ryan Cordell's "Viral Textuality in Nineteenth-Century US Newspaper Exchanges" uses Scottish poet Charles MacKay's "The Inquiry"--reprinted in whole or in part, in original and parodied form, in at least 93 American periodicals between 1840 and 1899--to argue that "virality can provide a useful comparative frame for thinking about the exchange of texts in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines" (p. 31). In "Visualizing the Cultural Field of Victorian Poetry," Natalie M. Houston subjects library catalog records and literary anthology tables of contents to computational scrutiny in order to generate empirical information about the state of poetry publication in the 1860s and of the Victorian poetic canon since the late 1990s. Houston's data, visualized in twenty-four figures available in the volume's digital annex (www.virtualvictorians.org), reveals just how small and inconsistent of a virtual simulation many of us rely upon to represent the network of Victorian poetry to our students and, perhaps, to ourselves. Finally, Allison Chapman's "Virtual Victorian Poetry" "addresses attempts to categorize poetry's value at the end of the nineteenth century through the cultural work of poems published in periodicals," most specifically the sequence of twelve poems published in 1889 by Mary C. Gillingham in Woman's World, then edited by Oscar Wilde (p. 145). In her close reading of the interplay between Gillingham's poetic text and the magazine's surrounding content and pattern of serialization, Chapman reveals how "poetry played a crucial role in the periodical, measuring and interrupting the rhythms of calendar time, exposing the mediations and construction of the virtual world of print while also demonstrating its all-encompassing nature and simulation of the real" (p. 163).

The multivalent intersection of poetry and periodical culture also informs Annmarie Drury's Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015), which focuses on English practices of and writings about poetic translation. Theoretically grounded in descriptive translation studies as formulated by Itamar Evan-Zohar, Gideon Toury, and Lawrence Venuti, Drury's monograph "considers how the expansion of translation to include languages that are themselves no part of the tradition of English literature ... tests and transforms English poetry" and casts translators into the quasi-imperial role of "agents of assimilation" (p. 3, p. 8). Acknowledging "the massive role of Victorian periodicals in publishing translations and pieces about translation," Drury devotes her first chapter to "six persistent habits of thought in Victorian approaches" to translation as articulated in the pages of Blackwood's, Fraser's, the Quarterly, and other prominent journals (p. 17, p. 33). These habits include the predominance of comparative evaluation, a strategy that permits readers without access to the source text or fluency in that text's original language to pass judgment on one or more translations as represented by selected key passages; fascinatingly, in the case of texts written in unfamiliar modern languages for which only one translation was available, Victorian reviewers often relied for comparison upon what they judged to be tonally or episodically similar touchstones from Greek or Latin classics. The assumed connections between meter and nationality--written about recently by Meredith Martin, Yopie Prins, and Jason Rudy--informs the Victorians' tendency to characterize the translator as "a negotiator of inter-metrical and hence international relations," their translations as "cultural emissaries, often in personified terms," and the act of translation itself as "cultural acquisition ... the accrual of cultural wealth, a commodifying task" (p. 39, p. 43, p. 45). Drury also identifies "a translatorly fascination with discovering new resources in English" to more accurately represent the linguistic form of exotic originals and traces how this "penchant for experiment nurtured controversy" (p. 47). Finally, she acknowledges a different sort of controversy surrounding the "translation informant as we now know him or her," asserting that "it is through and with the figure of the informant that the question of power dynamics and commoditization of knowledge that surround the making and reception of so many translations literally come to life" (p. 51, p. 52). This taxonomy serves as a framework within which to understand the specific cases addressed in Drury's subsequent chapters: in chapter 2, Tennyson's "uniquely conflicted" appropriation in the two Geraint sections of Idylls of the King of Charlotte Guest's translation of The Mabinogion (1838-45) (p. 57); in chapter 3, Robert Browning's multiform practice, parody, and theorizing of translation, centered on a stimulating close reading of "Caliban Upon Setebos" as "pseudotranslation" (p. 109); in chapter 4, FitzGerald's virtuoso translation of the Rubaiyat (1859) and its rich transatlantic afterlife in the writing of Swinburne, Michael Field, Mark Twain, James Whitcomb Riley, and, ultimately, Ezra Pound; and in chapter 5, the "unacknowledged persistence of Victorian practices within poetic translation in the twentieth century" (p. 193). As this ample range suggests, the extraordinarily flexible heuristic provided by Drury's first chapter could help to inform future critics interested in Victorian poetic translators not featured in Translation as Transformation, such as Barrett Browning or Augusta Webster.

Positioning itself as a chronological precursor to scholarship from Paula Feldman, Kathryn Ledbetter, and Margaret Linley on The Keepsake and Lorraine Kooistra on mid-Victorian illustrated gift books, Katherine Harris's Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823-1835 (Ohio Univ. Press, 2015) offers a meticulous early "sociology of the literary annual" (p. 23). Methodologically, Harris relies upon a fusion of bibliography and textual criticism in order "to account for the variables that created the literary annuals' phenomenal, yet ephemeral, place in both literary history and social memory" (p. 7). Among these variables was the early annuals' visual appeal, and much like the books that serve as its objects of analysis, Forget Me Not is lavishly illustrated, with 63 figures, many facsimile reproductions of original engravings, as well as ten tables and four appendices. These supplements help to propel an argument that is equal parts definitional, genealogical, biographical, literary historical, and ideological. Harris very precisely delimits the physical characteristics, intended audience, dates and methods of publication, original prices and collective sales figures, and peculiarities of content of the literary annual, which she differentiates from those of the gift book, the miscellany, the anthology, and other forms of the book with which it is frequently confused, including in library catalogues. She also establishes a cosmopolitan family tree for the literary annual that stretches back to the sixteenth-century and includes the Italian emblem, the French almanack, and the German Taschenbiich. The first publisher to assemble elements from these and other precursor forms together was Rudolph Ackermann, the founder of the R. Ackermann publishing house and Repository of Arts print shop, who established the literary annual with Forget Me Not (1823-47), and who is the focus of Harris first chapter. Among the literary historical assertions that Harris makes on behalf of literary annuals are, that they "participated in the production and evolution of the Poetess Tradition," within and against which every subsequent Victorian woman poet would have to position herself; and, that they "acted as catalysts" in the transformation of the Gothic from its original Romantic to its later Victorian iteration (p. 2, p. 265). Harris claims only to "set the table for further analysis of the feminine, empire, and nationalism"; however, Forget Me Not does advance its own provocative, if preliminary, ideologically-inflected arguments, including that by "completely denying the annual's German and French origins, critics enfolded these cultures into British nationalism," and that the literary annual "is best seen as a female body, its male producers struggling to make it both proper and sexually alluring, its female authors and readers attempting to render it their own feminine ideal" (p. 214, p. 227). Readers of Victorian poetry should find their appetites further whetted by Harris's Appendix B, which lists "Prominent Contributors to British Literary Annuals" through 1861 and in so doing suggests that an interpretive feast awaits those ready to partake of literary annuals published in the 1830s and beyond.