Browning's Beginnings

Browning's Beginnings PDF Author: Herbert F. Tucker Jr.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 081665882X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Browning's Beginnings was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Browning's Beginnings offers a fresh approach to the poet who, among major Victorians, has proved at once the most congenial and most inscrutable to modern readers. Drawing on recent developments in literary theory and in the criticism of romantic poetry, Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., argues that Browning's stylistic "obscurity" is the result of a principled poetics of evasion. This art of disclosure, in deferring formal and semantic finalities, constitutes an aesthetic counterpart to his open-ended moral philosophy of"incompleteness," Browning's poems, like his enormously productive career, find their motivation and sustenance in his optimistic love of the future—a love that is indistinguishable from his lifelong fear that there will be nothing left to say. The opening chapters trace the workings of Browning's art of disclosure with extensive and original interpretations of the unduly neglected early poems, Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello, and place special emphasis on Browning's attitudes toward poetic tradition and language. A chapter on Browning's attitudes toward poetic tradition and language. A chapter on Browning's plays identifies dynamics of representation in Pippa Passes, Strafford,and King Victor and King Charles. Tucker discusses the pervasive analogy between Browning's ideas about poetic representation and about representation in its erotic and religious aspects, and shows how the early poems and plays illustrate correlative developments in poetics and in the exploration and dramatic rendering of human psychology. The remaining chapters follow the poetic psychology of Browning to its culmination in the great poems of his middle years; exemplary readings of selected dramatic lyrics and monologues suggest that the ways of meaning in Browning's mature work variously bear out the sense of endlessness or perpetual initiation that is central to his poetic beginnings. Tucker thus contends that the "romantic" and the "Victorian" Browning have more in common than is generally supposed, and his book should appeal to students of both periods. Its discussion of general literary issues - poetic influence, closure, representation, and meaning - in application to particular texts should further recommend Browning's Beginnings to the nonspecialist reader interested in poetry and poetic theory.

Browning's Beginnings

Browning's Beginnings PDF Author: Herbert F. Tucker Jr.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 081665882X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
Browning's Beginnings was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Browning's Beginnings offers a fresh approach to the poet who, among major Victorians, has proved at once the most congenial and most inscrutable to modern readers. Drawing on recent developments in literary theory and in the criticism of romantic poetry, Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., argues that Browning's stylistic "obscurity" is the result of a principled poetics of evasion. This art of disclosure, in deferring formal and semantic finalities, constitutes an aesthetic counterpart to his open-ended moral philosophy of"incompleteness," Browning's poems, like his enormously productive career, find their motivation and sustenance in his optimistic love of the future—a love that is indistinguishable from his lifelong fear that there will be nothing left to say. The opening chapters trace the workings of Browning's art of disclosure with extensive and original interpretations of the unduly neglected early poems, Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello, and place special emphasis on Browning's attitudes toward poetic tradition and language. A chapter on Browning's attitudes toward poetic tradition and language. A chapter on Browning's plays identifies dynamics of representation in Pippa Passes, Strafford,and King Victor and King Charles. Tucker discusses the pervasive analogy between Browning's ideas about poetic representation and about representation in its erotic and religious aspects, and shows how the early poems and plays illustrate correlative developments in poetics and in the exploration and dramatic rendering of human psychology. The remaining chapters follow the poetic psychology of Browning to its culmination in the great poems of his middle years; exemplary readings of selected dramatic lyrics and monologues suggest that the ways of meaning in Browning's mature work variously bear out the sense of endlessness or perpetual initiation that is central to his poetic beginnings. Tucker thus contends that the "romantic" and the "Victorian" Browning have more in common than is generally supposed, and his book should appeal to students of both periods. Its discussion of general literary issues - poetic influence, closure, representation, and meaning - in application to particular texts should further recommend Browning's Beginnings to the nonspecialist reader interested in poetry and poetic theory.

Browning and Wordsworth

Browning and Wordsworth PDF Author: John Haydn Baker
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838640388
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
"This book will be of interest to students of English literature - particularly those working on Bloomian influence theory, Wordsworth, or Browning - as well as to more senior scholars working on poetry of the Romantic and Victorian periods. The work will also interest those working on the deeply ambiguous figure of the later Browning - simultaneously the most popular poet in the country after Tennyson and one of the most uncompromisingly complex - and his vexed relationship with the reading public."--BOOK JACKET.

The Shelleys and the Brownings

The Shelleys and the Brownings PDF Author: Rieko Suzuki
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800855230
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This book is about the intertextual relationships between the works of the Shelleys and the Brownings. While a lot of research has been done on the relationship between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Browning, virtually nothing has been said about the links between Mary Shelley and Robert Browning, and very little on the connections between the Shelleys and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Rieko Suzuki seeks to address this blind spot by focusing on three areas in particular: firstly, the way that Browning’s later poems reflect back on and re-engage with Shelley’s work; secondly, Mary Shelley’s influence on Browning’s early poems; and thirdly, Shelley’s presence in and influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s writing. In mapping out the various ways in which texts relate to other texts, the book also identifies a number of important thematic threads that run throughout the work of all four writers. These include theories of history and historical consciousness, providing a further dimension to the question of ‘influence’. They also include ideas about exile, gender, liberal politics and cultural heritage, central to almost all the texts discussed here, as the Shelleys and the Brownings, in different ways and in varying contexts, tried to negotiate the possibility of a more tolerant and resilient social, political and cultural environment.

The Poetry of Robert Browning

The Poetry of Robert Browning PDF Author: Britta Martens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350310190
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Robert Browning's pre-eminent status amongst Victorian poets has endured despite the recent broadening of the literary canon. He is the main practitioner of the period's most important poetic genre, the dramatic monologue, while his engagement with many aspects of nineteenth-century culture makes him a key figure in the wider field of Victorian studies. This stimulating introduction to Browning criticism provides an overview of the major responses to the poet's work over the last two hundred years. It offers an insightful guide to criticism from various theoretical perspectives, elucidating Browning's participation in Victorian debates about aesthetics, history, politics, religion, gender and psychology.

Robert Browning's Language

Robert Browning's Language PDF Author: Donald S. Hair
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148758962X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
What are the influences that shaped the language used by one of the nineteenth century's greatest writers? How did his religious beliefs, the books he owned, the paintings and music he loved, affect almost sixty years' output of poems, plays, essays, and letters? This book attempts to define Browning's understanding of the nature and use of words and syntax by considering not only a full range of texts from the 1833 Pauline to the 1889 Asolando, but also the ideas important to Browning, the historical context in which he lived, and the other artistic passions that played a part in his life. In this companion volume to Tennyson's Language, Donald Hair establishes Browning's place at the crossroads between empirical and idealist traditions and explains his "double view" of language, arguing that both Locke and the Congregationalists found language to be at the same time empty and a God-given essential. The Victorian age's anti-theatrical bias, which Browning came to share, and his reading of predecessors, principally Quarles, Bunyan, Donne, and Smart, also shaped his understanding of the diction of poetry. Hair conceives of Browning's language as a theoretical whole, encompassing words, genres, rhyme, syntax, and phonetics. He also links Browning's interest in music with his rhyming, the most essential and characteristic feature of his prosody, and relates his interest in painting to the interpretation of the visual image in the emblem and in typology.

Robert Browning's Romantic Irony in The Ring and the Book

Robert Browning's Romantic Irony in The Ring and the Book PDF Author: Patricia Diane Rigg
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838637739
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This study is a reading of Robert Browning as an ironist in the tradition of the German Romanticist Friedrich Schlegel, who coined the term "Romantic irony." Specifically, Patricia Diane Rigg considers historicity or historical truth in Browning's The Ring and the Book by distinguishing between the processes of representation and re-presentation within the context of Romantic irony.

The Plays of Robert Browning

The Plays of Robert Browning PDF Author: Thomas J. Collins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429638973
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Published in 1988, and including all seven of Robert Browning’s dramas, Collins and Shroyer introduce this convenient and reliable reading text by discussing the plays with a history of criticism and giving insightful notes on each individual play in the book.

Becoming Browning

Becoming Browning PDF Author: Clyde de L. Ryals
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814203523
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description


Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry

Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry PDF Author: Suzanne Bailey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136993339
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
Current work on speech pragmatics and visual thinking calls for a radical reassessment of the problem of obscurity or difficulty in Robert Browning’s work. In this innovative study, Bailey reinterprets Browning's life and work in the context of contemporary theories of language and attention, drawn from the cognitive sciences. Specifically, new readings of under-examined historical sources show the extent to which Browning’s cognitive and perceptual worlds differed from the norm, aligning him with Victorians like Sir Francis Galton or fellow-artist William Wetmore Story. Exploring how perceptual biases are transformed in the language of the poems, Bailey demonstrates how the cognitive sciences can ground a new biographical practice, drawing attention to such matters as the creative process and the ethics of understanding individuals who think differently. In doing so, she re-energizes debates about this unusual Victorian poet, his later works, and the nature of literary style.

Browning's Lyrics

Browning's Lyrics PDF Author: Eleanor Cook
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442637633
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Browning's lyrics are favourite choices for anthologies but are rarely examined closely. This is the first full-length study of the lyrics, and includes detailed analyses of such well-known poems as Love Among the Ruins, Two in the Campagna, A Serenade at the Villa, A Toccata of Galuppi's, By the Fireside, and James Lee's Wife. Eleanor Cook explores Browning's use of repeated images and themes in the lyrics, examines these patterns in other poems and in his letters, and analyses their growth and change in all his work. She demonstrates how the lyrics may be linked with Browning's other work and shows something of his essential artistic unity. His imaginary is found to be more consistent and complex than is usually assumed. Students of Browning will find this work stimulating and instructive, while lovers of Browning will read it with pure pleasure. The reader will return to many of the poems with a rciher sense of their continuing vitality. In an earlier form this study was awarded the first A.S.P. Woodhouse Prize by the University of Toronto.