Poetic Acts: Making Meaning

Compass Points for Victorian Poetry Studies: 2002-2004 and Beyond

“…15 As might be expected from his recent work, 16 E. Warwick Slinn reasserts the importance of the linguistic turn in performative studies of poetry; suggests that younger scholars interrogate the linguistic referentiality and politics of their own scholarship; and argues that in the finest Victorian poems, complex performative language exposed the ideologies, reifications and fundamentalisms in discourses surrounding it. 17 Herbert Tucker furthers his contention that literary form was 'the chief agency by which Victorian cultural meanings were organized, transmitted, and enforced', and he enacts his own point by exploring the synergy of metrics and social conditions in Tennyson's 'Hendecasyllabics'. 18 In the issue's concluding essay, Joseph Bristow exposes the cultural work of scholarship while also demonstrating the ballad's mobile cultural politics: 'Victorian' as a literary label was inaugurated by American critic E. C. Stedman in Victorian Poetry (1875), which explicitly linked the era's poetic development to the widening British empire.…”