Second Sight: The Visionary Tradition in late-Victorian Literature
Lead Research Organisation:
Queen Mary University of London
Department Name: English
Abstract
The project is set within the context of late-Victorian literary studies, an area of increasing interest because of its influence on literary n1odernism. With a specific aim to accent the literary and imaginative dimensions of the texts considered, this 80,000 word monograph examines six late-Victorian writers- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee and her half-brother Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy- to reveal their commitment to a Romantic visionary tradition which surfaces towards the end of the nineteenth-century in response to the threat of a growing materialism.
Taking the human face and form as the iconic aesthetic image, the book focuses on the repetition and reduplication of this image through mirrors, shadows, ghosts, portraits and the fleshly double. Certain key themes and devices- the lost or elusive woman and the structures of repetition and reduplication which emerge as a response to trauma or loss and help configure or shape identity- act as connections between the linked essays as does a recurrent interest in two literary figures: the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge whose particular strain of Romantic supernaturalism is highly influential and the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, noted for his obsessive portrayal of feminine forms and faces, and a mythic type of the reclusive artist stricken in the latter half of his career by the tragic bereavement of his wife.
The monograph starts with chapters examining the painter-poet D. G.
Rossetti and the critic Walter Pater, seen as founding figures of British Aestheticism and both often assumed to privilege materiality, in order to identify their strong counter-commitment to imaginative and phantasmal manifestations. Chapter I examines various archetypes drawn from classical myth- Narcissus, Perseus, slayer of the Gorgon Medusa, and Orpheus, a poet in search of his lost wife Eurydice- to show they inform Rossetti's poetry, and to illustrate that the making of Rossetti as a poet is inextricably bound up with processes of loss and compensation centred around the desired but unattainable figure of the female beloved. Examining Rossetti's use of reflections and mirror imagery, and his motif of the double, the chapter argues that Rossetti's sense of the visionary imagination, as expressed through mythic and symbolic images of elusive but inspiring femininity, is of central importance to the
Period and had a determinable impact on several of the other writers discussed in the book.
Chapter 2 on Pater is described above.
Chapter 3 examines the complex creative relationship between Vernon Lee (the only writer Pater acknowledged as a disciple) and her half-brother, the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton, a passionate admirer of Rossetti.
Focussing on Lee's supernatural fiction and aesthetic writings and Lee-Hamilton's darkly Gothic dramatic monologues, his imaginary Sonnets (1888) and Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1894), the chapter ponders their joint investment in the mythic figure of Venus, the elusive femme fatale and the compelling objet d'art, and traces their cultivation of a late Romantic sublime.
Chapter 4 is a re-evaluation of Aylwin (1898), the best-selling novel by the critic Theodore Walts-Dunton, a roman a' clef featuring Rossetti, and a strange amalgam of gipsy lore, the occult, mesmerism and Rmnanticis1n. Another meditation on the lost woman, the novel offers as part of its end-of-century restatement of Romantic values a particularly arresting treatment of woman-as-aesthetic image reduplicated through portraiture and mesmeric therapy.
The chapter traces the uncanny structures of corporeal doubling, repetition and transference which Walts-Dunton allies with Coleridge's 'Christabel' to consider the novel's strategic defence of the Romantic imagination. Chapter 5 focuses on Thomas Hardy, usually thought an empiricist, and shows how his imaginative investment in 'the other side' and his profound interest in spectres, shades and shadows figuratively illustrate his pronouncements on art and literature. This chapter examines forms of portraiture in Hardy's poetry that bridge the relation between the phenomenal and the visionary and considers their relation to loss, especially the theme of the lost woman.
The project thus introduces readers to a range of highly significant but often neglected writers and makes an important reassessn1ent of the late-Victorian period in its relation to visionary Romanticism which has important implications for our understanding of literary modernism.
Taking the human face and form as the iconic aesthetic image, the book focuses on the repetition and reduplication of this image through mirrors, shadows, ghosts, portraits and the fleshly double. Certain key themes and devices- the lost or elusive woman and the structures of repetition and reduplication which emerge as a response to trauma or loss and help configure or shape identity- act as connections between the linked essays as does a recurrent interest in two literary figures: the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge whose particular strain of Romantic supernaturalism is highly influential and the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, noted for his obsessive portrayal of feminine forms and faces, and a mythic type of the reclusive artist stricken in the latter half of his career by the tragic bereavement of his wife.
The monograph starts with chapters examining the painter-poet D. G.
Rossetti and the critic Walter Pater, seen as founding figures of British Aestheticism and both often assumed to privilege materiality, in order to identify their strong counter-commitment to imaginative and phantasmal manifestations. Chapter I examines various archetypes drawn from classical myth- Narcissus, Perseus, slayer of the Gorgon Medusa, and Orpheus, a poet in search of his lost wife Eurydice- to show they inform Rossetti's poetry, and to illustrate that the making of Rossetti as a poet is inextricably bound up with processes of loss and compensation centred around the desired but unattainable figure of the female beloved. Examining Rossetti's use of reflections and mirror imagery, and his motif of the double, the chapter argues that Rossetti's sense of the visionary imagination, as expressed through mythic and symbolic images of elusive but inspiring femininity, is of central importance to the
Period and had a determinable impact on several of the other writers discussed in the book.
Chapter 2 on Pater is described above.
Chapter 3 examines the complex creative relationship between Vernon Lee (the only writer Pater acknowledged as a disciple) and her half-brother, the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton, a passionate admirer of Rossetti.
Focussing on Lee's supernatural fiction and aesthetic writings and Lee-Hamilton's darkly Gothic dramatic monologues, his imaginary Sonnets (1888) and Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1894), the chapter ponders their joint investment in the mythic figure of Venus, the elusive femme fatale and the compelling objet d'art, and traces their cultivation of a late Romantic sublime.
Chapter 4 is a re-evaluation of Aylwin (1898), the best-selling novel by the critic Theodore Walts-Dunton, a roman a' clef featuring Rossetti, and a strange amalgam of gipsy lore, the occult, mesmerism and Rmnanticis1n. Another meditation on the lost woman, the novel offers as part of its end-of-century restatement of Romantic values a particularly arresting treatment of woman-as-aesthetic image reduplicated through portraiture and mesmeric therapy.
The chapter traces the uncanny structures of corporeal doubling, repetition and transference which Walts-Dunton allies with Coleridge's 'Christabel' to consider the novel's strategic defence of the Romantic imagination. Chapter 5 focuses on Thomas Hardy, usually thought an empiricist, and shows how his imaginative investment in 'the other side' and his profound interest in spectres, shades and shadows figuratively illustrate his pronouncements on art and literature. This chapter examines forms of portraiture in Hardy's poetry that bridge the relation between the phenomenal and the visionary and considers their relation to loss, especially the theme of the lost woman.
The project thus introduces readers to a range of highly significant but often neglected writers and makes an important reassessn1ent of the late-Victorian period in its relation to visionary Romanticism which has important implications for our understanding of literary modernism.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Catherine Maxwell (Principal Investigator) |