Perverse Form And Victorian Lyric

Abstract

Perverse Form and Victorian Lyric examines a tradition of lyric expressivity, exploring connections between language, subjectivity, and agency. By attending to salient formal issues in the work of three Victorian poets for whom pattern becomes persona-Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins-the dissertation argues for a poetic counter-tradition defined in opposition to major aesthetic commonplaces of the nineteenth and twentieth century. More particularly, this study shows how the voice of lyric-commonly regarded as the expression of a central self-is, in late Victorian writing, not the product of an organizing subjectivity, but the effect of apparently derivative formal technique. Rather than being grounded in the individual subject, the rhetorical and formal urgencies of Victorian poetry create situations of utterance where human characteristics, such as feeling, thought, and desire, hang on patterns of sound and line-what is here called perverse form.