Browning's Lyrics

Browning's Lyrics
Author: Eleanor Cook
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 1974-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442637633

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.

Browning's Beginnings

Browning's Beginnings
Author: Herbert F. Tucker Jr.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 1980-12-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081665882X

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 futureā€”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 Experiments with Genre

Browning's Experiments with Genre
Author: Donald S. Hair
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 1972-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487589603

One of the chief characteristics of nineteenth-century poetics was a tendency to test the conventions and techniques of literary genres by shifting, modifying, and combining various styles and forms. Browning fully exploited these changes, because his interests and purposes as a poet seemed to demand more of the lyric, the dramatic, and the narrative than these kinds had traditionally been able to perform. His fascination was with the development of the individual soul and he was determined to evoke in his readers his own insights into the complexity of human concerns; thus he became a constant experimenter with genre. Browning never felt that any experiment, however unsatisfactory the result, was wasted effort; each direction tried made him better prepared to attempt another. This book explores the kinds and modes with which he worked and describes the nature of the experiments he made, concentrating on the earlier poetry and in particular on The Ring and the Book. Professor Hair is sensitive to Browning's work, and his criticism is a model of understanding, warm appreciation, and critical good sense.

Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy

Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy
Author: Dr Britta Martens
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1409478874

Taking an original approach to Robert Browning's poetics, Britta Martens focuses on a corpus of relatively neglected poems in Browning's own voice in which he reflects on his poetry, his self-conceptualization and his place in the poetic tradition. She analyzes his work in relation to Romanticism, Victorian reactions to the Romantic legacy, and wider nineteenth-century changes in poetic taste, to argue that in these poems, as in his more frequently studied dramatic monologues, Browning deploys varied dramatic methods of self-representation, often critically and ironically exposing the biases and limitations of the seemingly authoritative speaker 'Browning'. The poems thus become devices for Browning's detached evaluation of his own and of others' poetics, an evaluation never fully explicit but presented with elusive economy for the astute reader to interpret. The confrontation between the personal authorial voice and the dramatic voice in these poems provides revealing insights into the poet's highly self-conscious, conflicted and sustained engagement with the Romantic tradition and the diversely challenging reader expectations that he faces in a post-Romantic age. As the Victorian most rigorous in his rejection of Romantic self-expression, Browning is a key transitional figure between the sharply antagonistic periods of Romanticism and Modernism. He is also, as Martens persuasively demonstrates, a poet of complex contradictions and an illuminating case study for addressing the perennial issues of voice, authorial authority and self-reference.

The Poetry of Robert Browning

The Poetry of Robert Browning
Author: Britta Martens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350310190

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: How to Know Him

Robert Browning: How to Know Him
Author: William Lyon Phelps
Publisher: DigiCat
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2022-09-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Robert Browning: How to Know Him" by William Lyon Phelps. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.