Robert Browning.

Martens, Britta

This year's output of Robert Browning scholarship has been healthy, with two volumes of letters, two contributions to the long-running critical editions of his work, a (nowadays rare) monograph by Suzanne Bailey, and a good crop of essays taking various approaches, among them several analyses which connect Browning with a variety of contemporary or later authors and a notable number of deconstructionist readings which make reference to him.

The most important publication of the year is Volume 15 of the Oxford edition of The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010). It covers the Parleyings With Certain People of Importance in Their Day and Asolando, as well as some fugitives from the last six years of the poet's life--all but two previously published. The volume offers a comprehensive body of annotations and some notable new research on these two late collections. The Parleyings is edited by Stefan Hawlin, who presents it as "a Liberal-Protestant progressivist tract for the times, a trumpet call to an imperial Britain inflected ... with anticipations of the grandeur of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee" (p. 1). The prologue and epilogue in particular encode a promotion of theologically and politically progressive Protestantism that criticizes backwardness and Catholic superstition. In "Apollo and the Fates"--which he identifies as inspired by the custom of performing Ancient Greek plays in the original language at Cambridge University--Hawlin points out the typological representation of Apollo as a Christ figure. He also solves the mystery of the main source for "Fust and his Friends," John Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Foxe presents Fust rather than Gutenberg as the inventor of printing and makes the connection between printing, the spread of Protestantism and civil liberty that is expounded in Browning's poem. The argument against Catholicism is also prominent in the parleying "With Daniel Bartoli," which promotes Browning's Liberal-Protestant concept of secular sainthood, that is sainthood defined by integrity of behavior rather than the miracles and asceticism of Bartoli's Catholic hagiography.

While the older Browning's strong interest in religious matters has long been recognized, his comments on contemporary politics have received much less attention. Hawlin sees the political context as crucial to the parleyings "With George Bubb Doddington" and "With Charles Avison." The former is of course used as cover for Browning's attack on Disraeli but also needs to be read as an expression of the poet's reservations about the widening of the franchise by the Third Reform Act of 1884. The poem is hence characterized by a Gladstonian desire to extend the franchise and a more conservative fear that the new voters might be too easily influenced by wily politicians. In the Introduction to the parleying with Avison, Hawlin offers some useful explanations of Browning's thoughts about changing tastes in musical style and his Whiggish equation of the politics of the Civil War with the liberal politics of the 1880s. Of particular interest is the reference towards the end of the poem to the Imperial Federal League. This body advocated a re-organization of Britain and its (predominantly white) colonies into a federated structure as a means of securing the future of the Empire and the dominance of British culture. Browning's enthusiasms for a kind of reformed imperialism which he reconciles with his progressive values reveal some interesting tensions in his politics. Although in terms of new discoveries Hawlin's edition has the edge over Susan Crowl and Roma King's Ohio edition of the poem (1998), the earlier edition is still essential reading because of its more generous annotations on some issues, such as the work and lives of some of the Parleyings' silent "interlocutors."

Michael Meredith's edition of Asolando is the first critical edition of this collection since Pettigrew and Collins' 1981 Yale/Penguin edition and represents an important advance on previous scholarship on these poems. Meredith's discussion of Browning's personal relationships during the period of composition adds substantially to our appreciation of the love poems. Building on his earlier research about Katherine Bronson, Meredith considers Browning's frustrated desire for more than friendship with the collection's dedicatee. He also offers new information about the poet's relationship with his much younger admirer Margaret Keep, who prompted poems such as "A Pearl, A Girl" and "Now." Here he points out the fine difference between poems that express current love and those that reflect on past love or on love in others.

Meredith also suggests some new literary sources. For instance, he interprets the so far baffling mention of Vernon Lee at the end of "Inapprehensiveness" as a reference to her volume of dialogues Baldwin, which he also suggests as a source for "Arcades Ambo." Other new discoveries include a poem by John Kenyon that is a precedent for the playful enactment of the Trojan War in "Development," and Browning's friendship with the painter Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife as a context for "The Lady and the Painter." The two most notable sources are Renaissance texts that informed Browning's preoccupation with love, Pietro Bembo's Neoplatonic dialogues Gli Asolani and an intriguing illustrated copy of Francesco Colonna's dream narrative Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a gift from D. G. Rossetti which may have influenced "Bad Dreams." The detailed introductions to this group of four poems offer an even-handed overview of the different readings of these enigmatic texts. Similarly helpful is the introduction to "Rephan," which explicates the obscure argument of a poem that is a key summation of the poet's ideas. Thanks to the meticulous research by Hawlin and Meredith, a much fuller picture emerges of the elder Browning's eclectic reading, of his personal relations and preoccupations.

Robert Browning: Selected Poems, edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin, and Joseph Phelan in Longmans' Annotated English Poets series (London: Longman, 2010) mostly contains poems which have already been published in the earlier three volumes in the series. However, for this selection of Browning's most frequently studied works, the editors have added ten poems from Dramatis Personae, which make up a quarter of the volume's 900 pages. These "new" poems, above all "A Death in the Desert," "Caliban Upon Setebots," and "Mr. Sludge, 'the Medium,'" are some of the most complex among Browning's shorter poems. They benefit a lot from the detailed explanatory notes, which make good use of the editors' previous research. They also fill a kind of gap in the critical editing of Browning's work as the Oxford edition of Dramatis Personae, which should be comparably well annotated, has not yet been published. The Longman edition of these texts thus offers a lot more guidance based on recent research and recently published letters than the critical editions of these poems that are currently available.

As always in the Longman edition, the poems are generously annotated, with great sensitivity to parallels in Browning's own work and to intertextual echoes, including some very obscure sources (as in the case of "Rabbi Ben Ezra"). The headnotes on "A Death in the Desert" contain an extensive section on the context of Higher Criticism, while those on "Mr. Sludge" provide a handy overview leading from nineteenth-century spiritualism to the Brownings' divergent opinions on the matter through to information about Daniel Dunglas Home's biography and writings. "Caliban" is introduced with a survey of Elizabethan to Victorian stage portrayals of the character which may have influenced Browning. The editors caution against readings that link the poem too closely to Darwin, suggesting instead that it is an attempt at representing a "primitive stage in the evolution of human ideas about God" (p. 622). For university teachers of Browning's major texts, this affordably priced selection offers a good alternative to the smaller Norton Critical Edition by James Loucks which was recently updated by Andrew Stauffer.

Volume 17 of The Brownings' Correspondence, edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, and Edward Hagan (Winfield: Wedgestone Press, 2010), covers the period from February 1851 to January 1852. It documents the Brownings' travels via Venice to Paris, London and back to Paris. As throughout the years of the poets' marriage, the vast majority of letters is by Elizabeth and reflects her impressions and opinions. It is often difficult to establish Robert's views. Thus we read of Elizabeth's rapturous response to Venice ("the real sight exceeded the imagination," p. 34), but all we learn about Robert, who had visited the city before, is that the climate made him quite ill. Reading Elizabeth's description of the couple sitting in a cafe in the Piazza San Marco and watching the "soundless crowd drift backwards & forwards through that grand square" (p. 37), one wonders whether this sight had any impact on the Venetian carnival scene in Fifine. During the journey to Paris, all we hear about Robert is that he is worried by the couple's strained finances. While he is writing the "Essay on Shelley," we get tantalizingly little insight into his mind, except for a remark to Carlyle that acknowledges the latter's oblique influence: "I have put down a few thoughts that presented themselves--one or two, in respect of opinions of your own--(I mean, that I was thinking of those opinions while I wrote)" (p. 150).

Besides Pen's development and Elizabeth's family matters, a major subject during this period is Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat, which the Brownings followed from their apartment on the Champs-Elysees. Again, Elizabeth's fascination with this Carlylean hero figure and her defense of the coup dominate the letters. She tells many correspondents about her "domestic emeutes" with Robert about the new emperor. Elizabeth presents Robert as easily influenced by their acquaintances among French journalists who oppose Louis Napoleon and concedes that he is motivated by sympathy "with some of the fallen" (p. 219). Does she mean the victims of the violent coup or disempowered politicians? Beyond such remarks, it is hard to say exactly what his opinions are. The many references in the letters to the political context are explicated well in the notes, as are references to the Brownings' reading, their movements in London and their correspondents' lives. An unexplained mention of "[Mad.sup.me] Dudevant" (p. 131)--George Sand's married name--is one of the rare instances where the reader would have appreciated another note.

A substantial fourteen-page biographical sketch of Joseph Milsand, who makes his first appearance in this volume, is also included. This offers a very useful survey of Browning's relations with the man who was to become his closest male friend. In addition to detailing his role as an advisor on Browning's proofs and his mediation between father and son about Pen's affair with a French innkeeper's daughter, the essay gives some insight into Milsand's intellectual preoccupations which may have influenced Browning. The cited view by Griffin and Minchin that Milsand's preference for poetry in propria persona moved Browning to put more of himself in his poetry is not too convincing, given that this suggestion had repeatedly been made to him by Elizabeth and Carlyle. But it could certainly be fruitful for future researchers in the Milsand Archive of the Armstrong Browning Library to examine the impact the religious writings of the Protestant convert Milsand may have had on Browning's later works such as the Parleyings with its pronounced celebration of Protestantism (see above).

Another important friend of the mature Browning is the addressee of a further volume of letters, Florentine Friends: The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning to Isa Blagden, 1850-1861 (Winfield and Waco: Wedgestone Press and Armstrong Browning Library, 2009), edited and very fully annotated by Philip Kelley and Sandra Donaldson. Most of Robert's letters to Blagden are of course already collected in Edward McAleer's edition of 154 letters, Dearest Isa: Robert Browning's Letters to Isabella Blagden (Austin: Texas Univ. Press, 1951). As the new volume limits itself to the Brownings' correspondence with Blagden prior to Elizabeth's death, most of its 232 letters are by her. Of the 43 letters (co-) written by Robert, four fairly insignificant ones have previously not been published. The main topics here are Elizabeth's health, reports about the couple's travels and the correspondents' shared acquaintances. The more interesting matter can be found not in Robert's, but in Elizabeth's letters, 146 of them published for the first time. These give a valuable insight into the Brownings' circle of friends among artists, British diplomats, and Italian liberals as well as into their lively interest in Italian politics. A detailed discussion of Elizabeth's share of the letters can be found in Marjorie Stone's review of last year.

Biography is also central to Suzanne Bailey's monograph, Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning's Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2010). Indeed, while the second half of the book is devoted to Browning's poetry, its first half focuses more on his personality, based on evidence from his correspondence, reported conversation, and impressions by contemporaries. Bailey discusses personal characteristics such as his impulsiveness and energy, his loud voice, his absentmindedness, and his exceptional memory for odd or peripheral details which contrast with other lapses in memory. She argues that these are related to the obscurity, digressive style, and jumps in trains of thought in his poetry, which are not deliberate aesthetic choices as scholarship usually assumes. Drawing on research about Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, she diagnoses Browning as displaying peculiarities in his perception and cognition that define this learning disability, such as the inability to shut out perceptions, to concentrate on a specific topic (as required for instance in public speaking, which Browning dreaded), or to reproduce an earlier train of thought (as evidenced in his tendency to limit textual revisions of his poetry to surface changes like punctuation).

His prose and his poetry are, in Bailey's view, the results of his unusual perception and cognition. Thus, his knotty syntax reflects his ability to think of two things at the same time and his inability to bear in mind the larger context of his utterance. She musters many examples from his poetry that demonstrate his gift for cross-sensory association, and she scrutinizes his use of metaphor with the help of cognitive linguistics. She also traces in several passages an intriguing emphasis on movement as a condition for the creative process, which she reads as informed by Browning's own experience of composition. The early narrative poems in particular, she argues, portray heroes who experience the same difficulties with language and the same restless energy as their creator.

The book's most compelling section is about an 1890 book by Browning's friend William Wetmore Story which discusses the neurodiversity of individual perceptual experiences, including phenomena like synaesthesia, visual and exceptional memory-conditions which Bailey suggests Browning may have discussed with Story even if he did not experience them himself in their extreme form. She demonstrates quite convincingly the poet's awareness of cross-sensory experiences, as in his integration of musical notation in "With Charles Avison." Yopie Prins's analysis of Browning's simultaneous use of poetic and musical meter (see below) would support Bailey's reading here.

With its wealth of contemporaries' anecdotes about Browning and his family, the book is very readable. It offers some seductively neat scientific reasons for some of his well-known characteristics, as in Bailey's explanation for his submissive stance vis-a-vis Elizabeth in the courtship correspondence: "Someone who is either alternately over- and underfocused, who may have difficulties with organization and decision-making, might rely to a greater extent on a partner's help; thus when Browning says 'think for me' he may not be exaggerating his need" (pp. 32-33). Similarly, Bailey diagnoses him as suffering from the kind of anxiety experienced by ADHD patients, concluding that his "anxiety states" lead to an "exaggerated need to control--not people, but perceptions of himself, evidenced in Browning's ruthless destruction of his correspondence and his insistence that his poems are never about himself" (p. 38).

Bailey also suggests that Browning, like ADHD patients, had a strongly visual memory, which accounts for the alinear narrative in a text like Sordello, where not temporality but visual association determines the development of the narrative. This visual bias seems to be borne out by the poet's constant preoccupation with the difficulties of converting his mental (apparently visual) conceptions into verbal expression. She also cites the use of vocabulary relating to vision in descriptions of his cognitive process, but here as elsewhere the question arises as to how literally such references should be taken and what other reasons Browning may have for using this terminology. In the use of "I see" in Book I of The Ring and the Book, for instance, he seems intent on aligning himself with the prestige of the Romantic visionary. Similarly, his use of Hamlet's "before my mind's eye" that Bailey cites (p. 51) associates him with Shakespeare. Bailey herself concedes that this vocabulary may merely reflect the dramatic character of his writing (p. 54).

This readiness to interpret the remarks of Browning and his contemporaries as deliberate and objective analyses of cognition rather than isolated anecdotes and occasional overstatements is more problematic in the first half of the book. For instance, when Bailey argues for his visual, quasi photographic memory (p. 51), is it really so unusual that Browning remembers the weather on his wedding day, one of the most important days in his life? And can we take literally his claim during the courtship correspondence that he remembers every single one of the forty visits he has made so far to a woman to whom he wants to prove his devotion? Similarly, can the alternately fond and exasperated comments about the apparent talents and learning difficulties of Pen really be taken as reliable evidence that a neurological condition ran in the Browning family? One cannot help thinking that many of Browning's reported characteristics sound quite normal or are merely slight overstatements, but the divide between normality and disability/different ability is of course difficult to draw. Bailey is on safer ground in the second half, where her claims about the closeness to ADHD are toned down and a good range of works is examined from an original perspective that supplements established critical readings.

This year has seen the relaunch of the journal of the London Browning Society, formerly Browning Society Notes, as the Journal of Browning Studies, which is now also available on Literature Online and soon via EBSCO. It is to be hoped that the electronic access (digitization of the complete back issues is also planned) will raise the visibility of Browning scholarship, as the analysis of canonical literary authors is crowded out of more generalist journals which concentrate increasingly on broader issues of Victorian culture. The new journal continues to publish research articles on both Brownings, alongside reviews and short notes, which in this first issue include Ashby Bland Crowder's re-interpretation of the speakers in "Inapprehensiveness," Francis O'Gorman's examination of a possible source for "Meeting at Night" and "Parting at Morning" in paired poems by Goethe, and Joseph Phelan's consideration of an unattributed poetic quotation in a Browning letter.

Two of the more substantial articles have a biographical focus. Katerine Gaja's "The Brownings at Vallombrosa: Landscape and Language" (JBS 1 [2010]: 37-48) examines the Brownings' response to the sublime landscape surrounding the abbey of Vallombrosa. The article deals primarily with Elizabeth, but there are also some observations on Browning's response to the location as another example of his lifelong preoccupation with the difficulties of transforming experience into language. Simonetta Berbeglia's "A Skeleton in the Wall: Robert Browning's Italian Story" (JBS 1 [2010]: 70-79) considers the circumstances surrounding an apparently lost poem about an immured medieval skeleton which Browning saw in a church near Arezzo. One can only imagine with what relish the poet would have tackled this gruesome subject.

In "'He told me what he would not tell': Confessional Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century Dramatic Monologue" (JBS 1 [2010]: 22-36), Sara Malton analyzes Browning's "The Confessional" and D. G. Rossetti's "A Last Confession." She argues that these poems do not, as one might expect, present genuine penitentiary acts that lead to redemption and social inclusion. Instead they are "the vindication of the past and, in effect, the revision of history" (p. 29). The confession thus paradoxically does not act as an exposure of truth but as a reminder of the difficulty of establishing meaning through speech. In this respect, Malton suggests, both poems exemplify the paradox of the dramatic monologue as a genre.

Browning's attitude to fellow authors is considered in three essays. Jane Stabler's "Romantic and Victorian Conversations: Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning in Dialogue with Byron and Shelley" (Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers, 1790-1835, ed. Beth Lau [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009], pp. 231-253) contributes to an essay collection which aims to dissolve the divide between the male and female Romantic traditions. Stabler examines how the two Brownings overcome the contemporary tendency to gender poetic voice. She argues that they encourage each other to reassess the other's early heroes, Shelley and Byron. Most strikingly, in Robert's case the essay suggests that the male heroes of his dramas show the impact of his re-reading of Byron under Elizabeth's influence. Stabler's findings offer an interesting counterweight to the older Browning's attacks on egotistical Byronism.

Browning also features in two contributions to an essay collection commemorating Tennyson's bicentenary edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry, Tennyson among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009). In a subtle reading of intertextual echoes, Daniel Karlin's "Tennyson, Browning, Virgil" (pp. 95-114) contrasts the two Victorian poets' attitudes to Virgil and implicitly to each other. The Poet Laureate's status as the Victorian Virgil and his tribute to the Roman poet's meter in "To Virgil" are juxtaposed with Browning's confrontational engagement with the content of Virgil's work. Karlin interprets "Pan and Luna" as an ironic criticism of those who read Virgil as "promot[ing] Christian values of conformity and piety, of renunciation, of the sublimation of desire" (p. 113). This attitude, Karlin suggests, can also be read as a veiled critique of Tennyson's poetry.

The artistic rivalry between the two poets is also the focus of Donald S. Hair's "'Brother-Poets': Tennyson and Browning" (pp. 199-212). Hair contrasts their cordial personal friendship with their more critical evaluation of each other's works as evident in letters and reported conversation. He also compares some characteristics of their poetry, including their conflicting advocacy of the short lyric/idyll (Tennyson) and the long narrative poem (Browning), their shared preference for dramatic poetry, and Tennyson's proto-modernist use of imagery as opposed to Browning's debt to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblem books. Particularly interesting is Hair's characteristic attention to prosody and to the two poets' very different styles of recitation, Tennyson's chanting which emphasized his masterful use of long vowels versus Browning's beating of the meter like musical bars while reading aloud.

A more extended analysis of this idiosyncratic manner of recitation is offered by Yopie Prins in "Robert Browning, Transported by Meter" (The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith L. McGill [New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2008], pp. 205-230). She examines not only his metrical irregularities but also his simultaneous use of traditional accentual syllabic verse and musical meter which "measure[s] time in isochronous intervals, like a bar of music" (p. 215). She relates the stop-and-start rhythm of his poetry to the movement of the railway and to the layout of the volume of railway timetables in which Pippa Passes was published. The timetable is just one of the "transportations" of Browning's work through modern media. Prins also considers correspondences between his meter and the musical meter of Amy Beach's musical score of Pippa's song and light effects in a silent film version of the poem. The suggested analogies between poetic meter and the other media are not always fully convincing--for instance, unlike a poem a timetable is not read from beginning to end but laid out to be quickly consulted--but the samples of Pippa's transformation, especially into the unlikely medium of silent film, provide a fascinating new insight into the reception of Browning's work.

There are another two articles about Browning's literary afterlife, this time in the more familiar medium of twentieth-century novels. June Sturrock's "How Browning and Byatt Bring Back the Dead: 'Mr. Sludge, the "Medium"' and 'The Conjugial Angel'" (Partial Answers 7, no. 1 [2009]: 19-30) compares the two authors' similar interest in the use of dramatic voices in their work. Sturrock points out the analogy between the artist and the spiritualist medium that has previously been made in relation to "Mr. Sludge." She argues that while Sludge is acknowledged to stand for the corrupt, self-centered artist whose aim is personal advancement, the spiritualist mediums in Byatt's novella who strive to offer comfort to the bereaved represent positive countermodels of the artist.

Catherine Lanone and Claire Omhovere's "Mourning/Mocking Browning: The Resurgence of a Romantic Aesthetics in Jane Urquhart's The Whirlpool (1986)" (Commonwealth Essays and Studies 31, no. 1 [Autumn 2008]: 8-21) develops an argument about the post-Romantic and post-colonial agenda of Urquhart's novel. As part of this reading, they consider how the Canadian novelist uses Browning in her prologue and epilogue. These depictions of the poet shortly before his death reflecting on his relationship with Shelley are read as Urquhart's way of approaching the novel's subject of literary influence.

Helen Small also pairs Browning with more recent authors. In "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner in Browning, Sillitoe, and Murakami" (Essays in Criticism 60, no. 2 [April 2010]: 129-147), she compares the implicit politics of "Pheidippides" with Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959) and Haruki Murakami's What I Talk about when I Talk about Running (2008). She acknowledges Browning's focus on the psychology of the individual runner but also reads his Pheidippides as an exemplary Hellenic citizen and possibly also an expression of the poet's English nationalist views on Balkan politics in the 1870s.

Another poem from the Dramatic Idyls series forms the subject of Evgenia Sifaki's "Masculinity, Heroism, and the Empire: Robert Browning's 'Clive' and Other Victorian Re-Constructions of the Story of Robert Clive" (VLC 37, no.1 [2009]: 141-156). This article is one of the most compelling contributions to the body of criticism about Browning's representation of masculinity that has emerged over the past few years. Contrasting it with an essay by Macaulay and a didactic boys' novel, Sifaki reads "Clive" as participating in "a Victorian debate about heroism that is intricately linked to the imperial and military dimensions of masculinity" (p. 142). She suggests that Browning challenges dominant ideology in undermining Clive's status as a masculine role model. The poem, she argues, refuses to subscribe to the common glorification of colonialism through its association with adventure, exposing instead the greed of the colonial enterprise. The duel episode which forms the core of the poem is presented not as a proof of Clive's bravery but of his "moral weakness" (p. 148), and heroism is redefined as Christian self-discipline and restraint.

Browning features in a number of publications which draw on deconstructionist theory and link him with the writings of Derrida. "The Medium Is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida, and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies" is the title of a book (Sussex Academic Press, 2009) as well as an article in the Oxford Literary Review 30, no. 2 (2008): 161-179, by J. Hillis Miller. I have only been able to see the latter. Miller engages with a debate about telepathy and literature to develop an argument about how contemporary communication media change notions of selfhood and private space. Juxtaposed with Freud's and Derrida's essays on telepathy, Browning's Mr Sludge is Miller's example of a spiritualist medium from the pre-digital age through which Browning grudgingly explores the use of telepathy as a rival means of communication to his own writing.

Sarah Wood, in "Dream-Hole" (Journal of European Studies 38, no. 4 [December 2008]: 373-382), also connects Browning with Derrida and Freud. Her focus is on Derrida's reading of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, especially the former's concept of writing and the regression from thoughts to feelings that he sees in both dreams and writing. The article's central image of the "dream-hole" or bell tower, and the ambiguities of this image, are illustrated by the Dark Tower in "Childe Roland."

Jo Carruthers' "Writing, Interpretation, and the Book of Esther: A Detour via Browning and Derrida" (Yearbook of English Studies 39, nos. 1-2 [2009]: 58-71) focuses on the two writers' references to the biblical Book of Esther, which abounds in written communications and problematizes the act of interpretation. Carruthers shows how the references to Esther in The Ring and the Book display Browning's characters as misreading the biblical text, thus articulating the poet's awareness that reading is unreliable. She reads Browning's rejection of clear-cut oppositions such as history versus myth and fact versus fiction as an anticipation of the deconstructionist undermining of such binaries. The analysis here could have extended to a consideration of how the multiperspectival presentation story of The Ring and the Book itself obliges Browning's reader to experience the uncertainty of interpretation. The article supplements, rather than engages with, the deconstructionist readings of the poem which make the same argument about the poem at greater length.

Another essay which takes a new approach to Browning's text but restates the findings of previous, more detailed research is Geoff Hall's "A Grammarian's Funeral: On Browning, Post-Structuralism, and the State of Stylistics" (The State of Stylistics, ed. Greg Watson [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008], pp. 31-44). His aim is "to investigate in what ways a new understanding of grammar--or less cryptically, a stylistics cognizant of poststructuralist claims--might facilitate understandings of the wider disorder of the universe which so pervasively informs Browning's poetry" (p. 36). His analysis of "A Grammarian's Funeral" does pay due attention to some grammatical features of the poem and how they signal the text's ambiguity, but it is not always clear how this approach differs from previous readings of the poem.

Finally, there is a not easily accessible but interesting article whose main object is not Browning's poetry but which uses him as a case study in the context of Victorian culture: Benjamin Kohlmann's "'Stand Still, True Poet that You Are!': Remembering the Brownings, Imagining Memorabilia" (Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 57, no. 2 [2009]: 125-137). The article considers Southeby's 1913 sale of the Browning Collections to analyze the late Victorian interest in the memorabilia of poets. In response to recent criticism about the Victorian commodification of objects, Kohlmann draws on Walter Benjamin's concept of the collector to demonstrate how collectors of memorabilia, especially those who are writers themselves, value these objects as ways of associating themselves with a literary tradition.

I would like to thank Cynthia Burgess of the Armstrong Browning Library for alerting me to some of the publications covered in this review.