The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry Cambridge Companions to Literature Series

The Victorian period has a strong tradition of poetry written by women. In this Companion, leading scholars deliver accessible and cutting-edge essays that situate Victorian women's poetry in its relation to print culture, diverse identities, and aesthetic and cultural issues. The book is inclusive in method, demonstrating, for example, the benefits of both distant and close reading approaches, and featuring major figures like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti and over one hundred poets altogether. Thematically arranged, the chapters deliver studies on a comprehensive array of subjects that address women's poetry in its manifold forms and investigate its global context. Essays shed light on children's poetry, domestic relations, sexualities, and stylistic artifice and conclude by looking at how women poets placed their published poems and how we can 'place' Victorian women poets today.

List of illustrations; Notes on contributors; Acknowledgments; Chronology of publications and events, compiled by Sofia Prado Huggins; 1. Introduction Linda K. Hughes; Part I. Form and the Senses: 2. Genres Monique R. Morgan; 3. Prosody Meredith Martin; 4. Haunted by voice Elizabeth Helsinger; 5. Floating worlds: wood engraving and women's poetry Lorraine Janzen Kooistra; 6. Embodiment and touch Jason R. Rudy; Part II. Women's Poetry in the World: 7. Publishing and reception Alexis Easley; 8. Transatlanticism, transnationality, and cosmopolitanism Alison Chapman; 9. Dialect, region, class, work Kirstie Blair; 10. Politics, protest, interventions: beyond a poetess tradition Marjorie Stone; 11. Religion and spirituality Charles Laporte; Part III. Nurturance and Contested Naturalness: 12. Children's poetry Laurie Langbauer and Beverly Taylor; 13. Marriage, motherhood, and domesticity Emily Harrington; 14. Sexuality Jill Ehnenn; 15. Poets of style: poetries of asceticism and excess Ana Parejo Vadillo; Part IV. Reading Victorian Women's Poetry: 16. Distant reading and Victorian women's poetry Natalie M. Houston; Afterword. Nineteenth-century women's poetry in the field of vision Isobel Armstrong; Further reading; Appendix. Poets' biographies.

Linda K. Hughes is Addie Levy Professor of English Literature at Texas Christian University. She is the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge, 2010) and Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (2005); co-author of The Victorian Serial (1991) and Victorian Publishing and Mrs Gaskell's Work (1999); and co-editor of A Feminist Reader 4 Volume Set: Feminist Thought from Sappho to Satrapi (Cambridge, 2013).