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In the afterword to this issue, Isobel Armstrong reflects on a phenomenology of nineteenth-century stained glass.

The following Turning Point offers responses, from four leading critics, to Isobel Armstrong’s Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth Century Fiction. At a time when the meaning and ...

The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Andrew H. Miller, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008, xiv + 260 pp., £21.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-...

he introduction presents the objectives behind collecting a series of papers on 'languages of emotion' and outline how this language might be articulated. The editors of this special issue ask if it is possible to 'think' the emotions and discuss the apparent tension between experiencing emotion (a non-linguistic event) and reflecting on emotion (a process which forces the individual to imagine it by means of equivalents). The displacement of emotion is explored in relation to both the volume's contents and also contemporary theorists on emotion from the neurologist Edmund Rolls to commentators such as Teresa Brennan and James Elkins. The authors finally consider how intellectual, academically accountable approaches to the subject of feeling might both account for and remain sensitive to immediate experiential responses.

Armstrong questions the discrete separation of dream and waking life, originating with Freud, in current psychoanalytical thinking, and asks, accordingly, 'what is a dream?' Alternative accounts of the relation between dream and waking states can be derived from Ella Freeman Sharpe's poetics of the dream, understood through the workings of metaphor, and through Wilfred Bion's reversal of Freud's categories, as he explored what it would mean to dream during the day. Insights into the nature of dreaming in Romantic poetry, particularly that of Shelley and Wordsworth, illuminate psychoanalytic discourses of dreams.

ion, they are empty of meaning. And this emptiness allows the poem to manipulate ideological conformism to reactionary values. Another of Tennyson's tactics is to pose an uninterpretable allegoricity, a saying otherwise that ducks reference. This way the text can occlude the contradictions of the dominant discourses it wants its readers to accept (for example, the contradictions between Christianity and capital) and enable its audience to write into its terms whatever conservative ideological positions it is invited to construct-whether religious, monarchical, imperialist, antifeminist. I wonder if Harrison's conviction that dominant discourses are monolithic and stable leads him to surrender too readily to the conservative elements in the text. At times, despite his understanding of ideology in process, his methodology forces him to posit a wholly unfractured or prefabricated conservative dominant in order to prove his poets' consent to or dissent from it. Certainly Arthur's daunting list of round table obligations--"To reverence the king [ . .] To break the heathen [...] To love one maiden only [...] teach high thought [...] And love of truth" (465-80) -is crushingly authoritarian and imperialist in spirit. What are the implications of reading differently? Interestingly, Graham's Ideologies of Epic takes up some of the passages Harrison discusses-including Tennyson's disavowal of his intention to write epic in the Idylls-but interprets them rather differently. Graham's understanding of ideology and discourse to some extent converges with that of Harrison, but his Bakhtinian model more emphatically refuses the monolithic status of discourse. He adroitly adapts Bakhtinian paradigms, arguing, as Bakhtin did, that the only context in which monologism is possible as an aspiration is the epic. Three elements of epic preserve a single discourse: the unity of a

First published in 1969, this edition collection brings together a series of essays offering a re-evaluation of Victorian poetry in the light of early 20th Century criticism. The essays in this collection concentrate upon the poets whose reputations suffered from the great redirection of energy in English criticism initiated in this century by Eliot, Richards and Leavis. What theses poets wrote about, the values they expressed, the form of the poems, the language they used, all these were examined and found wanting in some radical way. One of the results of this criticism was the renewal of interest in metaphysical and eighteenth-century poetry and corresponding ebb of enthusiasm for Romantic poetry and for Victorian poetry in particular. Most of the essays in this book take as their starting point questions raised by the debate on Victorian poetry, both earlier in this century and in the more recent past. There are essays on the poetry of Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, on that of Clough, who until recently has been neglected, and Hopkins, because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that he is usually considered to be a modern poet. The volume is especially valuable in that it will give a clearer understanding of the nature of Victorian poetry, concentrating as it does on those areas of a poet’s work where critical discussion seems most necessary.

The author concentrates on traditions governing the affects and the expression of emotion available to George Eliot. There is expressive emotion in Eliot's novels. Eliot herself, in her “Notes on Form in Art,” affirmed that poetry, by which she included all literary production, consisted of “relations and groups of relations” that “are more or less not only determined by emotion but intended to express it”. “Sympathy” is less likely to explain these “emotional states,” the author believes, than an understanding of Eliot's response to Spinoza. The author turns to what Eliot's translation of the Ethics would have shown her. In the Ethics Spinoza sets up both a logic and a phenomenology of the affects. There is no unconscious in Spinoza's logic. Pleasure and pain have their counterparts in love and hatred. The final section considers form and emotional states in Daniel Deronda, with a brief preface on Middlemarch.

(1995). Textual harassment: The ideology of close reading, or how close is close? Textual Practice: Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 401-420.

This lecture argues that new optical experiences created by the lens and what we now call the virtual image were the foundation alike of ‘high’ science, associated at this historical moment with the telescope, and popular spectacle. They precipitated and renewed an enquiry into the nature and status of the image (always incipient in poetics) as the technologies of the phantasmagoria, the kaleidoscope and the diorama penetrated deep into the poets' worlds and words. The projected image, without a correspondence in reality, was a troubling aspect of this modern technology, provoking new understandings of materiality and immateriality. Colour, reflection and refraction became central concerns as a corollary of the debate. Some poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Amelia Opie, Keats, Shelley) assimilated this imagery into their work, albeit skeptically. Others (Charlotte Smith, Blake) violently resisted it. The lecture looks closely at image-making in poetic language, and argues that there were both ontological and political stakes in this enquiry.

1. Introduction Isobel Armstrong Part 1: Knowledges 2. Feminist Aesthetics and the New Realism Laura Marcus 3. Walking, Women and Writing: Virginia Woolf as flaneuse Rachel Bowlby 4. Happy Families? Feminist Reproduction and Matrilinear Thought Linda R Williams 5. An Other Space: A Future for Feminism Jane Moore Part 2: Subjectivities 6. Releasing Possibility into Form: Cultural Choice and the Woman Writer Carol Watts 7. Fakes and Femininity: Vita Sackville-West and her Mother Suzanne Raitt 8. The Dangers of Angela Carter Elaine Jordan Part 3: Languages 9. Love, Mourning and Metaphor: Terms of Identity Kadiatu Kanneh 10. Why the Lady's Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun Lorna Hutson 11. Unsilent Instruments and the Devil's Cushions: Authority in Seventeenth-century Women's Prophetic Discourse Sue Wiseman Part 4: Representations 12. Getting down to Basics: Art, Obscenity and the Female Nude Lynda Nead 13. Do or Die: Problems of Agency and Gender in the Aesthetics of Murder Josephine McDonagh 14. The Politics of Focus: Feminism and Photography Theory Lindsay Smith 15. The Hand of the Huntress: Repetition and Malory's Morte Darthur Catherine LaFarge Part 5: Others 16. New Hystericism: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: the Body, the Text and the Feminist Critic Ros Ballaster 17. The Great Distinction: Figures of the Exotic in the Work of William Hodges Harried Guest 18. 'Because Men Made the Laws : The Fallen Woman and the Woman Poet Angela Leighton

A list of Immortals Hunt and I have prepared a list of Immortals, forming our creed and to be pasted up in our study for the affixing of all decent fellows' signatures. It has already caused considerable horror among our acquaintance: I suppose we shall have to keep a hairbrush. At the end of August 1848, at the height of his friendship with William Holman Hunt, and just as Pre-Raphaelite theories were beginning to emerge among a group of artist friends, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote about this iconoclast project to his brother, William. The list of ‘Immortals’ was intended to make people's hair stand on end (Dante Gabriel was alluding to the Latin sense of ‘horror’). Hence the need for a hairbrush. The list, on the principle of a Michelin Guide, gave star ratings on a scale of four to none to fifty-seven writers and artists, including Jesus, and a few political figures. ‘The first class consists only of Jesus Christ and Shakespeare’, Rossetti wrote. Hunt, who reproduced the list in his memoir of the Pre-Raphaelites, actually assigns four stars to Jesus (the only figure to receive four) and three to Shakespeare and ‘The Author of Job’. Two-star figures are Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Keats, Shelley, Alfred (the Saxon king), Landor, Thackeray, Washington and Browning. Boccaccio, Fra Angelico, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Patmore, Raphael, Longfellow, Tennyson and the ‘Author of Stories after Nature ’ (Charles Jeremiah Wells) get one star. Among those who get none are Pheidias, Rienzi, Spenser, Hogarth, Byron, Wordsworth, Michael Angelo, Early English Balladists, Titian, Tintoretto, Cromwell, Poe and Columbus. But their inclusion is intended to signify their importance (see Appendix Two for the complete list).

(1993). So what's all this about the mother's body?: The aesthetic, gender and the polis. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 172-187.

This viewpoint offers a comparison of recent British and American criticism of Victorian literature and culture, encompassing Dickens, Tennyson, the epic and ethical criticism. Discussion centres on recent studies by Sally Ledger, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Cornelia Pearsall, Kirstie Blair, Simon Dentith, Herbert Tucker, Andrew Miller and Mike Sanders.

The Hilda Hulme Memorial Lectures were established in 1985 following a donation from Mr Mohamed Aslam in memory of his wife, Dr Hilda Hulme. The lectures are on the subject of English literature and relate to one of ‘the three fields in which Dr Hulme specialised, namely Shakespeare, language in Elizabethan drama, and the nineteenth-century novel’.

The habit of thinking of literary periods as segments creates the same kind of history that produces it. The Victorian period has always been regarded as isolated between two periods, Romanticism and modernism. Thus Victorian poetry is seen in terms of transition. It is on the way somewhere. It is either on the way from Romantic poetry, or on the way to modernism. It is situated between two kinds of excitement, in which it appears not to participate. What has been called the ‘genetic’ history of continuous development through phases and periods, a form of history which the Victorians themselves both helped to create and to question, sees Victorian poetry as a gap in that development.1 Modernism, in spite of its desire to see itself in terms of a break with history, actually endorses that continuity, for a radical break must break with something. And correspondingly it endorses the gap which Victorian poetry is seen to inhabit. The anxieties of modernism, trying to do without history, repress whatever relations the Victorians may seem to bear to twentieth-century writing. Thus Joyce’s frivolous ‘Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet’ appears dressed for tennis in Ulysses. Virginia Woolf dissociates herself from the Victorians in her unscrupulously brilliant impressionistic account of them in Orlando.2 There ivy covers buildings and large families come into being with almost equally magical suddenness. She intuitively registers the drive to produce in Victorian society, whether it is children or industrial goods, and the need to muffle. The eroticisms and the euphemisms of bourgeois capitalism and its ideology, its inordinate excesses and concealments, are embodied for her in the voluptuous taxidermy of the stuffed sofa.