Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry

Political Dialects

Barbara Barrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032092331
• eBook ISBN: 9780429575204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Barrow's timely book is the first to examine the link between Victorian poetry, the study of language, and political reform. Focusing on a range of literary, scientific, and political texts, Barrow demonstrates that nineteenth-century debates about language played a key role in shaping emergent ideas about popular sovereignty. While Victorian scientists studied the origins of speech, the history of dialects, and the barrier between human and animal language, poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Thomas Hardy drew on this research to explore social unrest, the expansion of the electorate, and the ever-widening boundaries of empire. Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry recovers unacknowledged links between poetry, philology, and political culture, and contributes to recent movements in literary studies that combine historicist and formalist approaches.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Language, Poetry, and Radical Reform in Victorian Britain
• 1 “No perfect code”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Political Poetics and Women’s Language
• 2 “And talks to his own self, howe’er he please”: Robert Browning’s Antisocial Speech and Mid-Victorian Reform
• 3 The “yelp of the beast”: Alfred Tennyson’s Animal Language, Victorian Empire, and the End of Politics
• 4 To “obliterate his local colour”: Thomas Hardy’s “Provincial” Poetry and the Reform Act of 1884
• Conclusion: Revisiting Philology
• Bibliography
• Index