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With the publication of his ambitious new work Victorian
Poets and the Politics of Culture, Antony H. Harrison
continues his exploration of poetry as a significant force
in the construction of English culture from 1837-1900.
In chapters focusing on Victorian medievalist discourse,
Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold,
and Christina Rossetti, Harrison examines a range of
Victorian poems in order to show the cultural work they
accomplish. He illuminates, for example, such culturally
prominent Victorian mythologies as the exaltation of
motherhood, the Romanic appropriation of transcendent art,
and the idealization of the gypsy as a culturally alien,
exotic Other. His investigation of the ways in which the
authors intervene in the discourses that articulate such
mythologies and thereby accrue cultural power--along with
his analysis of what constitutes "cultural power"--are
original contributions to the field of Victorian
studies.
"The power of Victorian poetry by midcentury was enhanced
by the institutionalization of particular channels through
which it circulated," Harrison writes. "poetry was
'consumed' in more varied forms than was other literature."
Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture has
implications for both cultural studies and the study of
literature outside the Victorian period.
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"Antony Harrison's approach is quite special within the
field of Victorian poetry. He resists treating poems as
purely aesthertic objects; instead, he sees them as cultural
artifacts and, as such, as participants in contemporary
cultural discourses. His strength is his ability to keep an
eye on the specific language of a poem and, simultaneously,
on the larger cultural discourse in which it
participates."
--Linda Peterson, Yale University
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