Antony H. Harrison – författare

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As we have reached the centenary of Christina Rosetti's death, she has become considered as one of the major poets of the Victorian era. Leading critics have demonstrated how studies of Rossetti's work, her daily life, her relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites, and her interactions with other women authors of the period can help the people understand the cultural situation of Victorian women writers. When complete in four volumes, this project will make available all of Rossetti's extant letters. The letters in this second volume ""expose a woman of powerful intellect, complex emotions, unshakeable convictions and loving heart"". Rossetti, 43 years old in 1874, is now an established poet with a strong literary reputation among her contemporaries. But, as Harrison points out in his introduction to the volume, ""two thirds of her life was over, and its losses were mounting"". The marriage of William Michael, the death of her sister, Maria, Dante Gabriel's addiction to chloral and the illness that led to his death in 1882, and the deaths of close personal and family friends overshadow these years. Her own affliction with Graves' disease contributed to her becoming reclusive and a semi-invalid. She nonetheless continued to work and publish.

In recent years Christina Rossetti's star has soared. Rossetti (1830-1894) has come to be considered one of the major poets - not just one of the major women poets - of the Victorian era, eclipsing her famous brother. Leading critics have demonstrated how studies of Rossetti's work, her daily life, her relationships with the Pre-Raphaelites, and her interactions with other women authors of the period can help us understand the unique cultural situation of Victorian women writers. When complete in four volumes, this project will make available all of Rossetti's extant letters, almost two-thirds of which have never been published. The third volume of the ""Letters"" covers years in which Christina Rossetti lost several important family members, including her mother, her brother Dante, and a young nephew, Michael, and many close friends. Her preoccupation with their illnesses and with memorializing her brother took its toll on her poetic output. In the face of her loss, she turned increasingly to religion and wrote works of devotional prose - ""Time Flies"", ""Letter and Spirit"" - not designed to attract much literary attention. Rossetti herself had been diagnozed with Graves' disease in 1872; by 1874 she had recovered but continued to use her earlier health problems to identify herself as a ""semi-recluse"", which allowed her a degree of freedom she might not have had otherwise. This self-imposed reclusiveness gave rise to a large correspondence, in which her interest and sensibilities were given broad exposure. She devoted more time to favoured causes, including antivivisectionism and the protection of minors, and her letters afford the reader an in-depth perspective on these and other public issues and on the personal values underlying her opinions.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) has come to be considered one of the major poets - not just one of the major women poets - of the Victorian era, eclipsing her famous brother. Leading critics have demonstrated how studies of Rossetti's work, her daily life, her relationships with the Pre-Raphaelites, and her interactions with other women authors of the period can help us understand the unique cultural situation of Victorian women writers. The Letters of Christina Rossetti, four volumes, makes available all of Rossetti's extant letters, almost two-thirds of which have never before been published. These letters come from over one hundred private and institutional collections, scattered from Scotland to Australia. The fourth and final volume of the Letters covers the last eight years of Christina Rossetti's life. In 1887 Rossetti, at the age of fifty-six, was living with her two aged, ailing aunts. In addition to managing the household and nursing her aunts, she published an enlarged edition of her collected poems and, in 1892, wrote her greatest book of devotional prose, The Face of the Deep. She also oversaw the production of a new and enlarged edition of Sing-Song, published in 1893. As a stay-at-home semi-invalid, she maintained a very large correspondence with friends and family members. Her most intimate relationship was with her sole remaining sibling, William Michael Rossetti, but other correspondents include Amelia Bernard Heimann, Caroline Gemmer, Frederic Shields, Rose Donne Hake, Olivia Garnett, Ellen Proctor, Lisa Wilson, Arthur Symons, and Mackenzie Bell, who became her first biographer. In these letters we discover Rossetti's views on subjects as diverse as the artistry of her poems, her health, aging, death, gender roles, money, cats, flowers, games, and her own supposed sinfulness. In May of 1892 Christina Rossetti was diagnosed with breast cancer. The cancer was removed, but she suffered a recurrence in September 1894 and died on December 29th of that year.

Antony Harrison's approach is quite special within the field of Victorian poetry. He resists treating poems as purely aesthetic objects; instead, he sees them as cultural artifacts and, as such, as participants in contemporary cultural discourses. His strength is his ability to keep an eye on the specific language of a poem and, simultaneously, on the larger cultural discourse in which it participates. - Linda Peterson, Yale University

The Culture of Christina Rossetti explores a "new" Christina Rossetti as she emerges from the scrutiny of the particular historical and cultural context in which she lived and wrote. The essays in this collection demonstrate how the recluse, saint, and renunciatory spinster of former studies was in fact an active participant in her society's attempt to grapple with new developments in aesthetics, theology, science, economics, and politics.The volume examines Rossetti's poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives in order to reevaluate her place in the Victorian world of art, literature, and ideas. The essays offer a radical rethinking of her best-known poems, retrieve neglected works, establish the diversity of her writing, and reposition Rossetti within a canon continually under formation.Contributing to the ongoing retrieval of the nineteenth-century woman poet, The Culture of Christina Rossetti highlights Rossetti's responses to both male and female literary traditions and explores her incorporation and revision of literary influences from medieval Italian sources to contemporary writers.

The career of Matthew Arnold as an eminent poet and the preeminent critic of his generation constitutes a remarkable historical spectacle orchestrated by a host of powerful Victorian cultural institutions.The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold investigates these constructions by situating Arnold's poetry in a number of contexts that partially shaped it. Such analysis revises our understanding of the formation of the elite (and elitist) male literary-intellectual subject during the 1840s and 1850s, as Arnold attempts self-definition and strives simultaneously to move toward a position of ideological influence upon intellectual institutions that were contested sites of economic, social, and political power in his era.Antony H. Harrison reopens discussion of selected works by Arnold in order to make visible some of their crucial sociohistorical, intertextual, and political components. Only by doing so can we ultimately view the cultural work of Arnold "steadily and … whole," and in a fashion that actually eschews this mystifying premise of all Arnoldian inquiry which, by the early twentieth century, had become wholly naturalized in the academy as ideology.