Abstract: MLR, 105.1, 2010 225 shows how legends of ghosts haunting Wenlock Abbey seem to have influenced James in The Turn of the Screw. Altogether this is a fascinating, evocative, and scholarly book, itselfalmost a palimpsest revealing various 'texts' of various times. King's College London William Goldman Swinburne. By Catherine Maxwell. Tavistock: Northcote House and theBritish Council. 2006. 144 pp. ?12.99. ISBN 978-0-7463-0969-8. The Oxford English LiteraryHistory changed itsname to suggest the extent towhich itdiffered from its familiar predecessor, the Oxford History ofEnglish Literature. The similarlywell-loved 'Writers and their Work' series, towhich this volume be longs, has not done that. But the approach has, none the less, shifted significantly, with biography now reduced to a preliminary table of dates and 'work' treated in thematic rather than chronological ways. Swinburne has been handled in this series twice before: firstby Sir Herbert Grierson in 1953, then by Ian Fletcher in 1973. Fletcher began themove away from a straightforward life-and-works approach by confining biography to a single section and providing genre-based discussions of theverse, prose fiction, criticism, and drama. Catherine Maxwell takes amore radical step by basing her account of Swinburne's career on close readings of, in effect,just seven poems and three short critical essays. Fletcher stressed Swinburne's versatility, saw Atalanta in Calydon as his mas terpiece, and believed that the poetic gifthad been exhausted by the early 1870s. Maxwell, by contrast, suggests that 'interesting poems' were still being produced as late as 1904. But she skates over the plays and novels, confines her account of the criticism to the brief essays on Baudelaire, Rossetti, and Simeon Solomon, and founds her case for Swinburne as 'one of the outstanding poets of the nineteenth century' solely on a handful of key examples: 'Before theMirror' and 'Sapphics' from Poems and Ballads (1866), 'Pasiphae' (unpublished in Swinburne's lifetime but probably written in 1866 or 1867), 'Siena' from Songs before Sunrise (1871), 'Relics' and 'AVision of Spring in Winter' from Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878), and Tristram ofLyonesse (published in 1882 but begun as early as 1869). One consequence of these particular choices is that the attempt to revalue the later Swinburne remains rather thinly established: the close attention scarcely ex tends beyond the 1870s. But themore interesting issue is thematter of choice itself. Clearly the sympathetic overviews attempted by Grierson and Fletcher failed to rescue Swinburne's reputation: he remains amarginal figure, with few enthusiastic readers and a minimal presence in the academic syllabus. Does a highly selective but more closely observed account of his work provide amore effective argument forhis value? Something which exiguous selection does make room for is a much fuller de scription of the context of the poems. The ethical temper of Swinburne's writing in the early and mid-1860s, for example, is usefully related to the tone of con temporary sensation fiction, and there is an interesting discussion of the different 226 Reviews senses inwhich 'sympathy is prompted by his writing and George Eliot's. There is awell-informed account of the extent towhich Baudelaire provided a precedent for Swinburne's poetry, and Gautier and Shelley forhis prose. There is also a helpful sketch of the background of Songs before Sunrise in the politics of the Italian Risorgimento (a cause forwhich, asMaxwell points out, Swinburne's volume, after delays in the press, actually arrived too late). Above all, Maxwell's approach is informed by feminist literary theory inways which illuminate his treatment of gen der: the 'improper' sexuality of Sappho and Pasiphae, the idealised female authority of Hertha and Italy, or the femmes fatales of 'Faustine' and 'Dolores'. Making Swinburne relevant to theWoman Question might win him modern readers in ways that previous treatments of his work have not. That said, the individual readings on which this study so much relies are not always entirely persuasive. The bold decision to print and examine the little-known 'Pasiphae' pays offverywell, and thediscussion of'Sapphics' develops some shrewd remarks by JeromeMcGann into a wonderfully rich account of the poem as a ce lebration, simultaneously, of dissident art and aberrant sexuality. But the lengthy analysis of 'Before theMirror...
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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