The Victorian Imagination.

Catalog description

Explores themes and forms of the Victorian period, stressing the evolving role of the artist and the growth of self-consciousness in verse and prose. Victorian themes like the divided self, the love-duty conflict, and the inevitable crises of faith are recurring problems in the obsessive Victorian debate between flesh and spirit. Analyzes this dialectic in the poetry of Browning, Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites and Decadents, in a representative novel, and in the prose of Ruskin, Mill, and Pater.