'Things of shreds and patches': The nineteenth-century literary fragment

'Our poets are things of shreds and patches', their poetry the 'verbal echo' of 'the general moral crisis and imaginative disintegration' of the latter part of the nineteenth century; such is the opinion of George Santayana in The Poetry of Barbarism (1900). Victorian literary texts offer many instances of fragmentation and dissolution, and yet most research into the fragment in English literature has tended to focus upon the eighteenth century and the Romantic era, in studies such as Anne Janowitz's England's Ruins (1990), and Marjorie Levinson's The Romantic Fragment Poem (1986). Moreover, when the critical scope is broadened to encompass later texts, these are generally the explicitly fragmentary texts of Modernism, as is the case in Balachandra Rajan's The Form of the Unfinished (1985). Critical writing on Victorian literature has previously gestured towards the significance of the unfinished or fragmentary - examples being Seamus Perry's chapter on 'returns' in his Alfred Tennyson (2005) or Catherine Maxwell's on Vernon Lee in Second Sight (2008) - but, to my knowledge, this has yet to be the primary focus of a study. My thesis will therefore address this gap by exploring the development of the fragment as it appears in Victorian literature.

Two critical concerns of the era which form the basis for my thesis are the increasingly fragmentary nature of Victorian writing and, relatedly, its perceived femininity. As Alfred Austin wrote in Temple Bar in 1869, 'we have, as novelists and poets, only women or men with womanly deficiencies, steeped in the feminine temper of the times', and I propose that this anxiety and Santayana's concerns are significantly interlinked. The femininity of the fragment has previously been highlighted in Elizabeth Wanning Harries's The Unfinished Manner (1994) and, according to Yopie Prins's influential study Victorian Sappho (1999), Sappho - arguably the embodiment of the poetic fragment - was regarded as 'the emblem of Victorian womanhood'. My thesis will therefore be informed by the perceived femininity of the fragment, and its implications for the reception of both male and female writers of the period.

The thesis will be framed by discussions of literary remains, with a specific focus upon lyric poetry, and there will be a strong emphasis upon visual and material culture throughout, especially with regard to manuscript evidence. In the intervening sections of the thesis, I will address various conceptions of the fragment more broadly, such as representations of bodily fragmentation, and the limitations of artistic endeavor. Key authors for the project include: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Swinburne, Vernon Lee, and George Eliot. My findings in each case will be supported by close-readings of relevant texts, alongside considerations of the fragment as a physical object, and the ways in which the Victorian attitude to material fragments, from antique ruins to household waste, can illuminate wider social concerns.