Regina Barreca (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).īram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), 25–63.Įdgar Allan Poe, “Life in Death ,” The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1983), 734–738. Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988)Įlisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992) For book-length studies, see, particularly, Barbara T. This tradition has attracted extensive critical attention. Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 19. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977), 33. Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1996), 166–167. Roxanne Eberle, “Rewriting the ‘vile text’: Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Social Reform,” in Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1972–1897: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 168–201.Ĭatherine Maxwell, “The Poetic Context of Christina Rossetti’s ‘After Death,’” English Studies 76.2 (1995), 144–145. Harrison and Beverly Taylor (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1992), 67–83 See, for example, Diane D’Amico, “Equal before God: Christina Rossetti and the Fallen Women of Highgate Penitentiary,” in Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Culture, ed.
Rossetti often represented the “fallen woman,” and the relationship between such work and her volunteer work with “fallen women” at Highgate Penitentiary has attracted a great dea l of critical attention. This is not to suggest that Rossetti avoided the topos of sexual trans-gression in terms of representation, but such aesthetic representation was not in itself transgressive-it was rather, by midcentury, quite common. Mary Arseneau, Antony Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Athens: Ohio UP, 1999), 263.Ĭatherine Maxwell, “The Poetic Context of Christina Rossetti’s ‘After Death,’” English Studies 76.2 (1995), 154. Susan Conley, “Rossetti’s Cold Women: Irony and Liminal Fantasy in the Death Lyrics,” The Culture of Christina Rossetti, ed. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.Īs quoted by Alison Chapman, The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (New York: Saint Martin’s, 2000), 83. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. But supposing she set out to do something innovative and subversive in her poetry- rather than unconsciously stumbling into it, as Victorian readers who recognized her innovations suggested-how would she go about it? Transgression at the hand of a woman writer could not burst onto the scene as “shock.” Women did not “burst” or “shock” if they wished to be received as ladies and wished, as ladies, to be publishable. Unlike her French contemporary, Rossetti rarely comments on her poetry, poetic practice, or aims.
Why did no one notice? Difficult, subversive, self-reflexive, ironic, Rossetti’s poetry throughout this collection is marked by qualities readers readily associate with Baudelaire and the tradition in modern poetry he is understood to have inaugurated. I begin with my central question: suppose that with Christina Rossetti’s 1862 collection Goblin Market and Other Poems, a transgressive, innovative strain in poetry emerges in England nearly simultaneously with Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal in France and its more recognized poetics of shock.