Tag: Poetry

‘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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“Willows whiten, aspens shiver”: A Reading of Affects in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”

Other

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’1 creates an anachronistic medieval ambience by borrowing the mythical figures of Dame Elaine of Astolat and Lancelot, the feudal settings of Camelot, and the manorial island of Shalott. As a complex blend of medieval and Victorian motifs, it also creates an interesting intersection between medieval and Victorian affects. This essay brings to the fore the constructedness of affects as social artefacts in the poem, which become embedded in a network of material or

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Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Fiction and Nineteenth-Century Cross-Cultural Dialogue

Other

The cross-cultural dialogue generated as a part of the discursive assimilation between the East and the West during the nineteenth century was not only textured and nuanced, but further reflected larger epistemological debates emerging from this socio-historic conflation of ideas. The question of ‘colonial modernity’, which gained currency in later critical writing, focusing on the multiplicity of ideological categories formed as a part of this discursive shift, certainly testifies to the transformative cultural landscape of the time period. Significant among

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The Tragic Poet: Whose Name was Writ in Water

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy

There are those who consider the words of the sanguine poet scarcely worth the reading. A prescription formula for funerals, heartbreak and teenage angst, poetry has long been established as the literary tonic for the dilapidated human condition. In the name of authenticity, it naturally follows that the greater the suffering of a maudlin bard, the greater their work and legacy. Mythology has romanticised and popularised the tragic poet, a familiar archetype in celebrity literary culture. It is the reason

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“A Shadow of a Magnitude”: Toru Dutt’s Writing and Nineteenth-Century Cross-Cultural Dialogue

Other

This is an ode to one of those poets of the world literary tradition whose work captured and immortalized the everlasting magnanimity of the natural world, in the spirit of the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century, who strived for excellence in the literary arts, whose life was like a temporal spring that came to an end at the time when it was blossoming; like the nightingale’s voice of Keats’ poem, or the ‘golden autumn’ of Chatterton’s. Yet it was

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Panacea, poison and psychopharmacology: the lure of laudanum

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy

In the first half of the nineteenth century, many opiate preparations were marketed towards females. In fact, many were branded using the names of women, for example: ‘Mrs Winslow’s soothing syrup’ and ‘Mrs Bailey’s quieting syrup.’ Hardly surprising then that opium, particularly laudanum, was a popular choice for women for most of the century. The mass production of opiates in this way shows how society gave credence to the idea that opium and laudanum were able to relieve most ailments.

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Sarojini Naidu, Cultural Exchange and Anti-Imperialism

Other

Sarojini Naidu was a nineteenth century poet and political activist. Her upbringing was, in a sense, privileged because she was born into a middle-class family of well-educated Brahmins. Her father was a scientist and her mother a Bengali poet, so she also had strong literary ties. This gave her the space and opportunity to write and develop her English poetry and yet this was not the sum of her ambition. She used her connections, English education and social standing to

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Cotton Famine Poetry as Affective Commentary in Lancashire and Beyond

Published in JVC, Victorians in Film

Apart from short journalistic pieces and the material produced for the database [1] associated with the AHRC-funded project, ‘The Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine 1861-65’, my article which appears in Journal of Victorian Culture 25.1 is the first of probably several publications on the literary-historical-cultural subject to which I have devoted the last few years of my research. The article’s title, “This ’Merikay War’: Poetic Responses in Lancashire to the American Civil War’, with its reference to provincial Lancashire

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