Algernon Charles Swinburne

Catherine Maxwell is Professor of Victorian Literature at Queen Mary, University of London|Stefano Evangelista is Fellow and Tutor in English at Trinity College, University of Oxford

Candid, ambitious and sympathetic, this is a confident and often eloquent volume on a writer who keeps resisting the explanations that we are told best account for him. Immaculately edited, it earns its place among the best of modern writing in Algernon Charles Swinburne - poet and enigma.Francis O'Gorman, Times Literary Supplement, Mischief and other minds, 10/01/2014|It encourages those interested in Swinburne's work to read him in many different ways and take part in the effort of mapping his vast poetic and critical corpus., Yisrael Levin, English Literature in Transition 1880 - 1920, 2014'The chapters provide an enriching blend of perspectives that, to varying degrees, pivot on the ways ‘sexuality itself might help shape, inform, or condition style, poetics, and other aspects of literary practice’. The essays collected in Unofficial Laureate… will be of immense benefit to students, experts, and dilettantes of Swinburne. They are set to cast a long shadow, to galvanize and update Swinburne studies, reigniting the slow-burning interest in this underrated Victorian poet and his work.'Kostas Boyiopoulos, Durham University

• Introduction – Catherine Maxwell and Stefano EvangelistaI. Cultural discourse1. Swinburne’s French voice: cosmopolitanism and cultural mediation in aesthetic criticism – Stefano Evangelista2. Swinburne’s swimmers: from insular peace to the Anglo-Boer War – Julia F. Saville 3. Swinburne: a nineteenth-century Hellene? – Charlotte Ribeyrol4. ‘A juggler’s trick’? Swinburne and journalism 1857–75 – Laurel BrakeII. Form 5. Metrical discipline: Algernon Swinburne on ‘The Flogging-Block’ – Yopie Prins6. What goes around: Swinburne's A Century of Roundels – Herbert Tucker7. Desire lines: Swinburne and lyric crisis – Marion Thain III. Influence 8. ‘Good Satan’: the unlikely poetic affinity of Swinburne and Christina Rossetti – Dinah Roe9. Parleying with Robert Browning: Swinburne’s aestheticism, blasphemy, and the dramatic monologue – Sara Lyons10. Whose muse? Sappho, Swinburne, and Amy Lowell – Sarah Parker11. Atmosphere and absorption: Swinburne, Eliot, Drinkwater – Catherine MaxwellIndex