Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism : Passengers of Modernity

and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800-1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era. "Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture deals with the way in which natural history was connected to the world of fairies and highlights how shifts in the understanding of natural history, especially after 1859, had a significant impact on fairy stories and Victorian experiments with the literary fairy tale. By exploring the interaction between scientific and literary fields, this book shows the ways in which natural knowledge was shaped and disseminated in Victorian culture and illuminates cultural practices through which new representations of nature and the natural world were popularised. This original approach to Victorian culture, blending studies of fictional and non-fictional narratives, examines therefore a part of the history of the mediation of knowledge about nature in the Victorian period and points out how the mediation of this new knowledge contributed to the Victorians' awareness of environmental issues"-- Provided by publisher "Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950 explores a range of real and fictional colonial girlhood experiences from Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa, India, New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, and Canada to reflect on the transitional state of girlhood between childhood and adulthood. The interconnected themes of colonialism, empire, gender, race, and class show how colonial girls occupy ambivalent positions in British and settler societies between 1840 and 1950. Although girlhood is often linked to freedom, independence, novelty, and modernity, it may also represent an idea that needs to be contained and controlled to serve the needs of the nation. Across national boundaries, the malleability of colonial girlhoods is evident. Drawing on a range of approaches including history, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies, this book reflects on the complexities of girlhood during the colonial era."-- Provided by publisher In this fascinating and innovative look at late-nineteenth century urban poetry, Ana Parejo Vadillo provides a detailed and largely unexamined history of the poetics of late-Victorian London to suggest a new account of urban aestheticism and metropolitcan life. A study of the London-based women poets Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, 'Graham R. Tomson' (Rosamund Marriott Watson) and Michael Field, this book unearths women poets' remarkably sophisticated engagement with the urban experience in an original way. Shifting the focus from the fleneur or stroller to the passenger and drawing on images, maps, texts and lyric writings of many kinds, this book explores the cultural dimension of London's urban transport in the late-nineteenth century and captures its prominent role in the formation of the passenger as the poet of modernity. Offering a unique insight, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism argues that these women poets were passengers of and to modernity This book re-examines cultural, social, geographical and philosophical representations of Victorian London by looking at the transformations in urban life produced by the rise and development of urban mass-transport. It also radically re-addresses the questions of epistemology and gender in the Victorian metropolis by mapping the epistemology of the passenger. Vadillo focuses on the lyric urban writings of Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, 'Graham R. Tomson' (Rosamund Marriott Watson) and 'Michael Field' (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper). Shortlisted for the ESSE Book Prize Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction: Passengers of Modernity....Pages 1-37 Amy Levy in Bloomsbury: The Poet as Passenger....Pages 38-77 Alice Meynell: An Impressionist in Kensington....Pages 78-116 The Fastest Neighbourhood in Town: Graham R. Tomson in St John’s Wood....Pages 117-153 Modernity in Suburbia: Michael Field’s Experimental Poetics....Pages 154-195 Postscript: The End of the Line?....Pages 196-199 Back Matter....Pages 200-266