Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, “On the Publication of John Clare’s The Rural Muse, 1835″
This entry places John Clare’s book The Rural Muse in the context of the publishing landscape of 1835. Tracing the publication history of two poems that appeared in that volume as well as in the periodical press and in literary annuals, “A Spring Morning” and “The Nightingale’s Nest,” Weiner shows how attending to the modes and formats of print publication illuminates thematic and formal aspects of Clare’s poems. Clare’s approach to the sonnet, his treatment of nature, and his concept of the book are examined.
E. Warwick Slinn, “On Robert Browning’s Men and Women“
Robert Browning’s Men and Women, a two volume publication of new poems, was a major literary event in nineteenth-century Britain. These poems shift emphasis from the private, atemporal, and generally non-social genre of Romantic lyricism to the ironies and enigmas of human awareness and social relationships, to dramatic action in human speech. Browning’s men and women are presented overtly as speech acts, grounded in psychological and cultural origins, and in the ambiguities of linguistic processes. Readers often found Browning’s mode of writing obscure, but its methods and implications consistently engage with other domains of Victorian thought—in religion, biology, and psychiatry. While the status of this publication was not widely understood at the time, its value is manifest in its reception history, in the discussion and representations that constitute its ongoing existence as a historical event.
