Elegy for an Age

The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature

By (author) John D. Rosenberg

Publication date:

15 February 2005

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

234x155mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781843311560

This rich and elegant work describes how the unsettled cultural climate provided fertile soil for the flourishing of elegy. John Rosenberg shows how the phenomenon of elegy pervaded the writing of the period, tracing it through the voices of individuals from Carlyle, Tennyson, Darwin and Ruskin, to Swinburne, Pater, Dickens and Hopkins. Finally, he turns from particular elegists to a common experience that touched them all - the displacement of the older idea of the earthly city as a New Jerusalem by the rise of a new image of the Victorian city as an industrial Inferno, a wasteland of sprawling towns and of rivers so polluted they caught on fire.

List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; 1. The Age of Elegy; 2. Carlyle: History and the Human Voice; 3. Stopping for Death: Tennyson's In Memoriam; 4. Tennyson and the Passing of Arthur; 5. Rusking's Benediction: A Reading of Fors Clavigera; 6. Water into Wine: The Miracle of Ruskin's Praeterita; 7. Mr. Darwin Collects Himself; 8. The Oxford Elegists: Newman, Arnold, Hopkins; 9. Swinburne and the Ravages of Time; 10. Walter Pater and the Art of Evanescence; 11. Varieties of Infernal Experience: The Fall of the City in Victorian Literature; Notes; Bibliography; Index

'Now, in his magnum opus, John D. Rosenberg gives us an overview, showing that the great Victorians were so disoriented and frightened by the pace of change around them that they ached back in beautiful elegies to the world that was disappearing. It is our story, too.' —Garry Wills, Pulitzer Prize winner and Professor of History at Northwestern University