Description: Time and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry explores the question of poetry's relation to time and argues that this relation is historically contingent - as the concept of time changes, so too do the shaping forms and definitions of poetry. Victorian literature provides a rich testing field for its hypothesis, since the nineteenth century saw momentous changes in the ways people thought about and experienced time. This book demonstrates that these changes were an important factor for some of the long-term developments in Victorian poetry, like its loss of cultural prestige, the popularity of mixed genres like the poetic sequence, the dramatic monologue and the verse novel, and the demise of metrical poetry as the norm. Moreover, the historical perspective offered questions some widely held assumptions, not only about poetry, but also about time itself. Thus, the theoretical relevance of this study extends well beyond its Victorian context.
Brief description: Irmtraud Huber is Professor for English Literature at the University of Konstanz. She has also held positions at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and the Universität Bern. Before turning her research interest to the Victorians, she published two monographs on contemporary fiction, Present-tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction (2016) and Literature after Postmodernism (2014). For her work, she has received awards from the Deutscher Anglistenverband and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
Review Quotes: This is a book of both careful literary scholarship and insightful reading of texts for those interested in Victorian literature and culture. [...] I firmly endorse the author's effort to complicate the singular meaning of "time" in poetry to a plurality of temporalities.--Rosemary Huisman, The University of Sydney "Kronoscope"