Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation argues that the dialectic and dynamic relationship between the periodical review and poetry creates a culture of evaluation which shapes Victorian poetic form. The mediation of poetry by the periodical review orients poets towards public readership and reception, heightening their self-consciousness about their audience and generating a poetics of publicness. Using methodologies associated with historicalpoetics and new formalism, the book examines the dialogues between poets and periodical reviews from the 1830s to the 1860s. It juxtaposes male and female poets and canonical and uncanonical texts. Challenging the critical binaries of fame and celebrity, the culture of evaluation posits a new way of readingVictorian poetry. It illuminates poets' engagement with the immediacy and inevitability of writing for the present and for the contemporary media through which poetry was read and disseminated. New patterns of reception were created by mass print culture and both poets and reviewers were preoccupied with reaching the newly constituted mass audience. The changes to the material forms of poetry (e.g. through the periodical or gift-book) and the subjection to the commercial imperatives of the literary marketplaceencouraged bold experiment with verse. The book identifies three poetic strategies for articulating the preoccupation with a mass audience and the demands of mass media: voice, style and address. Chapters on voice, style, and address explore the development of poetic form in dialogue with periodicalreviews.

Readers interested in Victorian poetry and poetics, nineteenth-century print culture, or reception studies will find in this book an engaging account of Victorian poets' aesthetic responses to contemporary reviews, as well as a welcome contribution to the history of literary judgement and value., There is now a considerable body of work on the role of 19th-century reviewers as taste makers in a diversifying literary marketplace. In this intriguing study, Dawson (Univ. of Manchester, UK) contributes by analyzing how poetic form and literary reviewing were mutually constitutive. A thoughtful, lucid monograph accessible to nonspecialists as well as specialists. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty., [Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation] helps us to see once again how Victorian poets could develop formal solutions to social or institutional problems. In particular, Dawson illuminates figures of aesthetic value that were shared between poems and reviews—figures that crystalize notable Victorian ideas about poetry's worth and reach. In this thoughtful and stimulating work of scholarship, Dawson enriches our understanding of Victorian poetry and print-culture alike.

Clara Dawson is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Manchester.