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The article focuses on the enduring value of physical books and libraries in the face of advancing digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI). Topics include the evolution of digital access to Victorian literature, the limitations of AI in capturing the material and bibliographic nuances of physical books, and the importance of preserving and studying physical texts to fully understand their historical and personal contexts.

Christopher M. Keirstead begins his Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism by imagining 'an Atlas of Victorian Poetry' (p. 1) that could represent the complex internationality of the [...]

The past year has seen the publication of several important volumes with reference to the study of nineteenth-century book history. I have to pass briefly over the magisterial two-volume Oxford [...]

Erik Gray's elegant and evocative new study, Milton and the Victorians (Cornell Univ. Press, 2009) takes up the question of Milton's influence in the wake of the Romantic agon diagnosed [...]

Taken together, this year's books in Victorian studies demonstrate the continuing ascendancy of historical contextualization as a critical mode. Two of them explore a dialectical relation between mind and body, [...]

The Burden of Nineveh that was always an important work for Rossetti even though he recognized its difference from his typical style and subject matter is discussed.

'All the new thinking is about loss,' writes Robert Hass in 'Meditation at Lagunitas.' Much recent work in Victorian studies seems evidence for such a claim, indexed by a marked [...]

The journal Punch satirized both the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the arrival of sculptures from the ancient Babylonian city of Ninevah to the British Museum in the 1850s. Both criticisms are anti-Catholic reactions to movements and art connected in the minds of the British public with Catholicism.

Revised versions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' and 'A Curse for a Nation' demonstrate how cultural context influences interpretation. 'The Runaway Slave' and 'A Curse' were first published in editions of the US gift-book 'Liberty Bell,' the first poem in 1847, the second in 1855. 'A Curse' protested US consideration of annexing Cuba as a slave state, and 'The Runaway Slave' addressed US slavery. When the poems were revised and published in England, people read them as critical of England, which was not Browning's intention.

Issues concerning a manuscript version of Lord Byron's poem 'The Irish Avatar,' which is available in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, are examined. Topics include the probability the version was copied by someone from a pre-publication draft of Byron's poem, the publication of Byron's poem in 1821, and the lost copy of Byron's original manuscript.