Anne Woolley
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Siddal, Keats and Pre-Raphaelite relations of power
in The poems of Elizabeth Siddal in context
Chapter DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526143853.00010
Online Publication Date:
09 Mar 2021
Abstract only
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Siddal’s drawing A Woman and a Spectre shows there can be two aspects to a woman’s persona, a dualism Keats also believed in, creating a further platform for intertextual dialogue. Both Keats and Siddal were Pre-Raphaelite constructs, Millais, Hunt and later Rossetti being drawn to Keats’s poems in an effort to give the Brotherhood a philosophy. Keats was also a source of inspiration for C. Rossetti. The Brotherhood are seen to have played a crucial role in Keats’s heritage, radically changing his image after adverse critical reception and adopting his rich sensory Medievalism, and use of allegory and metaphor, hair especially, in both their art and poetry. Four of Keats’s poems, Lamia, Isabella and the Pot of Basil, The Eve of St Agnes and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ are read against three from Siddal’s collection, prefaced by a history of their illustration in PR hands, examples of the significance of ekphrasis in operation. Representations of the physical body abound in these works, in its needs, health, and temptations. Similarly, the spectral body allows for an extended range of emotion and experience, and the possibility of posthumous existence. The resulting power struggle between the two elements is shown to be ultimately transformative.
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eISBN:
9781526143853
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Cover The poems of Elizabeth Siddal in context
Subjects:
Literature and Theatre
Keywords:
Keats; nineteenth-century women’s poetry; Pre-Raphaelites; Rossetti; Ruskin; Siddal; Swinburne; Tennyson; Victorian art
Page Count:
297
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

Series: Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century

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Cover Hartly House, Calcutta

Hartly House, Calcutta

Phebe Gibbes

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
13 Feb 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
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This novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings’s rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes’s portrayal of Sophia’s Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice.
Cover Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Civic reading practice in contemporary American and Canadian writing

Author:
Zalfa Feghali

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
16 Apr 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
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Can reading make us better citizens? This book sheds light on how the act of reading can be mobilised as a powerful civic tool in service of contemporary civil and political struggles for minority recognition, rights, and representation in North America. Crossing borders and queering citizenship reimagines the contours of contemporary citizenship by connecting queer and citizenship theories to the idea of an engaged reading subject. This book offers a new approach to studying the act of reading, theorises reading as an integral element of the basic unit of the state: the citizen. By theorising the act of reading across borders as a civic act that queers citizenship, the book advances an alternative model of belonging through civic readerly engagement. Exploring work by seven US, Mexican, Canadian, and Indigenous authors, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erín Moure, Junot Díaz, and Yann Martel, the book offers sensitive interpretations of how reading can create citizenship practices that foreground and value recognition, rights, and representation for all members of a political system.
Cover Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Author:
David Brauner

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
12 Jan 2021
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
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This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.