Second sight
The visionary imagination in late Victorian literatureCatherine Maxwell
This challenging and important study, which examines a range of canonical and less well-known writers, is an innovative reassessment of late Victorian literature in its relation to visionary Romanticism.
It examines six late Victorian writers - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy - to reveal their commitment to a Romantic visionary tradition which surfaces towards the end of the nineteenth century in response to the threat of a growing materialism. Offering detailed and imaginative readings of both poetry and prose, Second sight shows the different ways in which late Victorian writers move beyond materiality, though without losing a commitment to it, to explore the mysterious relation between the seen and the unseen.
A major re-evaluation of the post-Romantic visionary imagination, with implications for our understanding of literary modernism, Second sight will be required reading for scholars interested in the literature of the late Victorian period.
Acknowledgements
A note on the texts
Introduction
1. ‘An aching pulse of melodies’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetic magnetism
2. ‘Walter Pater’s ‘strange veil of sight’
3. Of Venus, vagueness, and vision: Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, and ‘the spell of the fragment’
4. Theodore Watts-Dunton’s Aylwin and the reduplications of Romanticism
5. Thomas Hardy’s poetry: ‘the intenser stare of the mind’
References
Index
Catherine Maxwell is Reader in Victorian Literature at Queen Mary, University of London
234x156mm 272pp
hb 9780719071447 25 November 2008 £55.00
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