Victorian Poetry's Modernity

Kreilkamp, Ivan

doi:10.1353/vp.2004.0009

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Of particular note in this regard is Ivan Kreilkamp's seminal article “Victorian Poetry's Modernity,” published in Victorian Poetry in 2003. Drawing directly on Habermas's definition of modernity as “discontinuity in everyday life” (“Modernity—An Incomplete Project” 5), Kreilkamp argues that such discontinuities may well be found in Victorian poetry as an “implicit or covert tendency” despite the fact that the poetry is “to some degree anti‐modernist in its explicit presentation” (605).…”

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Is Victorian Poetry Modern?

Guthrie

2017

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Until recently, the Victorian era has been understood as largely anti-modern. Much Victorian poetry was simply ignored by critics, who often saw it as regressive. The poets from the period who did garner attention often did so because they seemed to be "ahead of their time." Starting in the 1990s and continuing into the present, literary critics have begun to revisit the question of Victorian poets' relationship to modernity. This scholarship, which often focuses on how poetry from the period was shaped by industrialization and technological innovation, contends that the work of many Victorian poets can be understood as fundamentally modern. This article brief ly reviews older scholarship on Victorian poetry's relationship to modernity, surveys more recent critical interventions, and suggests the development of a critical approach to the poetry of the period that would neither collapse the terms "Victorian" and "modern" nor simply set them at odds with one another.If either "Victorian" or "modern" were simply what they appear to be -designators of time periods -then this article's titular question could easily be resolved. That the question remains one of serious scholarly debate is a testament to the slippery qualities of both terms, which are understood to embody temperaments as much as times or, more accurately, temperaments toward time. While my title poses the question of whether Victorian poetry is modern, I do not intend to directly answer it here. Rather, in tracing the critical history of this question, I will demonstrate how the terms "modern" and "Victorian" designate experiences of temporality that are tied up with one another in complex ways. The first part of this article will brief ly summarize the traditional understanding of the term "Victorian," which defines it in opposition to the "modern" and, implicitly, defines the "modern" against the specter of a backwards Victorianism. Then, I will survey more recent scholarship that has challenged this oppositional framework. Finally, I will suggest -through a short reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Wreck of the Deutschland" -a way of recognizing the coexistence of the "modern" and the "Victorian" within nineteenth-century British poetry that does not collapse these terms or simply set them at odds with each other.The term "Victorian" has been overdetermined almost since the moment it was coined. While, at its most basic level, it describes the years of Queen Victoria's reign , even in Victoria's lifetime there were attempts to associate it with a particular social, aesthetic, and political attitude. In "Whether 'Victorian' Poetry: A Genre and Its Period," Joseph Bristow notes that within only two years of Victoria's ascension to the throne, "The Athenaeum ventured that 'Victorian' would succeed 'Georgian' as the definition of the age" (88) and traces the first attempt to provide a literary definition of the "Victorian" to Edmund Clarence Stedman's 1875 book Victorian Poets. It focused on how the era's poets were shaped by large-scale soc...

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Is Victorian Poetry Modern?

Guthrie

2017

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“…But in their most recent iterations, emerging poetic discourses seem often to omit Meredith’s name from their rosters. Ivan Kreilkamp in a piece titled ‘Victorian Poetry’s Modernity’, does not even mention Meredith; when Kreilkamp asks, ‘why do we have no English Charles Baudelaire, no mid‐nineteenth‐century poet whose work participates, explicitly and consciously, in the early theorization of modernity occurring at the time in France and Germany and America?’, one wonders why Meredith did not spring immediately to mind (605).…”

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George Meredith’s Poetry and the Critical Imagination

Mitchell¹

2011

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This article offers an overview of criticism of George Meredith's poetry in the last century and a half and situates Meredith's work within current and emergent trends in Victorian studies. The first section addresses the original critical response to Meredith's verse and the early, influential studies that serve as the basis for later scholarship, noting the emphasis on 'Modern Love' to the near exclusion of Meredith's corpus beyond that poem. It then traces the reasons for these limitations, including the access problems created by the lack of current print editions of Meredith's poetry. Next, it surveys recent additions to Meredith criticism. The article concludes by suggesting scholarly and pedagogical directions for working with Meredith's poetry, arguing that it is particularly well suited to the interdisciplinary, neoformalist, and narratological approaches now defining Victorian poetry scholarship.

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Introduction

Jamison¹

2009

Poetics en Passant

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Victorian Poetry's Modernity

Cited by 7 publications

References 9 publications

Is Victorian Poetry Modern?

Is Victorian Poetry Modern?

George Meredith’s Poetry and the Critical Imagination

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