Category: Essay

‘Out of Style’: Taylor Swift, Genre, and the Victorian Novel

Essay, Victorians Beyond the Academy

Known all too well for her name in popular culture, Taylor Swift is gaining a reputation in literary circles, too. To enchanted listeners, she’s not just a singer-songwriter; she’s a poet as well. Following the release of Swift’s eleventh album, The Tortured Poets Department (2024), Stephanie Burt published an article in The Nation that recognised Swift’s mastery of literary devices, ranging from apostrophe and hyperbole to slant rhyme. Burt is certainly not alone in her attention to Swift as a

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Reading Toru Dutt as a ‘Romantic’ Urban Nature Poet

Essay

Sing his name, o dear, who in this far land Sings your name in all his songs for Bengal. Michael Madhusudan Dutt, ‘Kapatakkha River’. This essay reads nineteenth-century poet Toru Dutt’s work as a Bengali author’s successful attempt to write the Romantic sonnet in English, but within a Bengali context. Dutt achieves this both by being influenced by, and deviating from, the poetics of the British Romantics. The poems in focus are ‘Sonnet — Baugmaree’ and ‘Sonnet — The Lotus’,

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