Time and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry: (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture)

Time and Timelessness in VictorianPoetryexplores the question of poetry's relation to time and argues that this relation is historically contingent as the concept of time changes, so too do the shaping forms and definitions of poetry. Victorian literature provides a rich testing field for its hypothesis, since the nineteenth century saw momentous changes in the ways people thought about and experienced time. This book demonstrates that these changes were an important factor for some of the long-term developments in Victorian poetry, like its loss of cultural prestige, the popularity of mixed genres like the poetic sequence, the dramatic monologue and the verse novel, and the demise of metrical poetry as the norm. Moreover, the historical perspective offered questions some widely held assumptions, not only about poetry, but also about time itself. Thus, the theoretical relevance of this study extends well beyond its Victorian context.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction ‒ Time, History and the Lyric 1. ‘Utterly vain is, alas! This attempt at the Absolute, – wholly!’ – Poetry’s Changing Relation to Timeless Truths 2. Negotiating Time in Victorian Genre Innovations 3. Idle Poetry and Poetic Idleness ‒ Poetry in the Age of the Gospel of Success 4. Hearing Time in Metre ‒ Prosody between Abstraction, Mechanism and Embodiment 5. Of Time and Poetry ‒ Towards a Theory of Poetic Temporality Works Cited Index

About the Author :
Irmtraud Huber is Professor for English Literature at the University of Konstanz. She has also held positions at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and the Universität Bern. Before turning her research interest to the Victorians, she published two monographs on contemporary fiction, Present-tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction (2016) and Literature after Postmodernism (2014). For her work, she has received awards from the Deutscher Anglistenverband and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

Review :
This learned and lucid book is a valuable contribution to the literature on genre and Victorian poems... Huber offers elegant interpretations of Victorian poems, including the most frequently taught works and others chosen wisely. Huber’s interpretations are cogent, and so are her graceful dissents with other theorists. She situates her arguments about lyric poetry in the context of the transformations of the society to which the poetry responds—socialism, class struggles, urbanization, mechanization, commercializing of time, theories of evolution, secularization, erosion of certainties, the acceleration of time, and relativities everywhere. Time and Timelessness is a foundational text for anyone interested in the temporal repercussions (and aesthetic experience) of the rhythm, representations, and illusions which underscore so much of the Victorian poetry with which we are most familiar. Huber is not only a sensitive reader of poetry but also an admirably rigorous thinker. Her chapters brim with valuable insights, and her meticulous analysis of the origins and varieties of poetic timelessness is consistently compelling. [...] This book is a timely one in many senses, and it will no doubt be read with great interest and enjoyment by Victorianists and scholars of poetry alike. This is a book of both careful literary scholarship and insightful reading of texts for those interested in Victorian literature and culture. [...] I firmly endorse the author’s effort to complicate the singular meaning of “time” in poetry to a plurality of temporalities. How can an aesthetic form that claims to be timeless survive the rapidity of social and technological change driven by industrial capitalism? Irmtraud Huber’s incisive study of poetic form, genres and metre gets to the heart of one of the key debates in literature: what is poetry for in the modern age?