A95: 1.Bolton, John Robert Glorney, and Holloway, Julia Bolton, eds. Pref. material and notes to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. xx + 517 pp.Google Scholar

A95: 2.Crowder, Ashby Bland, ed. The Inn Album and Of Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper. Volume XIII of The Complete Works of Robert Browning with Variant Readings & Annotations. Athens: Ohio UP; Waco, TX: Baylor U, 1995. xxvi + 392 pp. ¶Rev. by Nineteenth Century Literature 50 (Dec. 1995): 414.Google Scholar

A95: 3.Jack, Ian, and Inglesfield, Robert, eds. Men and Women. Volume 5 of The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. Oxford: Clarendon P; New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 560 pp.Google Scholar

A95: 4.Kelley, Philip, and Lewis, Scott, eds. The Brownings' Correspondence, Volume 10. [See A92: 12.] ¶Google Scholar

Rev. by Erickson, Lee, Nineteenth-Century Prose 22.2 (Summer 1995): 169–76.Google Scholar

A95: 5.Kelley, Philip, and Lewis, Scott, eds. The Brownings' Correspondence, Volume 11. [See A93: 9.]Google Scholar

¶ Rev. by Erickson, Lee, Nineteenth-Century Prose 22.2 (Summer 1995): 169–76Google Scholar

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A95: 6.Kelley, Philip, and Lewis, Scott, eds. The Brownings' Correspondence, Volume 13: 05–09 1846. Winfield, KS: Wedgestone P, 1995. xiv + 421 pp.Google Scholar

A95: 7.McSweeney, Kerry, ed. Introd. and notes to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Aurora Leigh. [See A93: 10.] ¶Rev. byGoogle Scholar

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A95: 8.Reynolds, Margaret, ed. Introd. and notes to Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. [See A92:16.] ¶Rev. byGoogle Scholar

Maxwell, Catherine, Review of English Studies 46 (02 1995): 137–38.Google Scholar

B95: 1.Cohen, Edward H., ed. “Victorian Bibliography for 1994.” VS 38.4 (Summer 1995): 739–40.Google Scholar

B95: 2.Donaldson, Sandra M. “Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography for 1992.” VLC 23 (1995): 413–37.Google Scholar

B95: 3.Gibson, Mary Ellis. “Guide to the Year's Work in Victorian Poetry: 1995: Robert Browning.” VP 33.3–4 (Aut.–Win. 1995): 524–33.Google Scholar

B95: 4.Mermin, Dorothy. “Guide to the Year's Work in Victorian Poetry: 1995: Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” VP 33.3–4 (Aut.–Win. 1995): 519–24.Google Scholar

C95: 1.Anderson, Amanda. Tainted Souls and Painted Faces. [See C93: 1.] ¶ Rev.Google Scholar

by Hall, Donald E., VP 33.3–4 (Aut.–Win. 1995): 507–09;Google Scholar

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C95: 2.Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics. [See C94: 3.] ¶Rev.Google Scholar

Dinah, Birch, Review of English Studies 46 (11 1995): 597–98;Google Scholar

Buckley, Jerome H., Albion 27 (Summer 1995): 340–42;CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Hughes, Linda K., Victorian Periodicals Review 28.3 (Fall 1995): 270–72;Google Scholar

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C95: 3.Bailey, Suzanne Joan. “‘Witnessing the Unpresentable’: Modes of Reflexivity in Eight Nineteenth-Century Texts.” U. of Toronto, 1993. DAI 55.12 (06 1995): 3835A. ¶lncludes RB.Google Scholar

C95: 4.Bristow, Joseph, ed. Introduction to Victorian Women Poets: Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martins P, 1995. 1–31. ¶Examines EBB's place as a precursor and questions why she herself felt she had no poetic tradition before her. Neither Felicia Hemans nor Letitia Elizabeth Landon, with their artificial style and romantic idealism, were an inspiration. Christina Rossetti implies a similar problem with EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese in her “Monna Innominata”; she however was a much less public, even courageous, poet. Aurora Leigh articulates both a distinctively female aesthetic and also “bourgeois ideology”; it may be read as a challenge to patriarchal power as well as an enthralling Victorian romantic fiction. Dorothy Mermin suggests “that it was sometimes hard for the woman poet to find a space from which to speak that did not demand that her work was forever embedded in those negative assumptions about femininity which her poetry was frequently attempting to subvert.” Reprints C85: 15 (Deirdre David), C84: 23 (Sandra Gilbert), C89: 42 (Angela Leighton), C86: 39 (Dorothy Mermin).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

C95: 5.Brooks, Roger L., and Humphrey, Rita S., eds. Selected Papers from the Centennial Symposium, Robert Browning and Nineteenth Century Culture. Studies in Browning and His Circle 18 (1990), 96 pp. [See C92: 6.] ¶Part 2 of proceedings from a conference held at the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor Univ., 20–22 September 1989.Google Scholar

C95: 6.Cervo, Nathan. “Browning's ‘Bishop Blougram's Apology’.” Explicator 53.2 (Winter 1995): 87–89. ¶Suggests that RB named his bishop Sylvester Blougram because St. Sylvester's Night in Italy “ushers in January,” named after the two-faced, two-headed Roman god. Thus, he looks “at earth and heaven, doubt and assent” and becomes one with the object of contemplation, “pure faith.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

C95: 7.Christ, Carol T. “Browning's Corpses.” VP 33.3–4 (Aut.–Win. 1995): 391–401. ¶Sees Victorian ideas about representation of the dead in RB's poems, especially the “macabre project on the part of the living to use corpses to support their own fictional construction of reality.” In “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church,” the bishop attempts “to become his own funerary monument.” RB claims in The Ring and the Book that his poem is an act of resuscitation. “Porphyria's Lover,” “Evelyn Hope,” and “Gold Hair: A Story of Pornic” suggest that, like the characters, a poet performs “grotesque fictionalization of the dead” in order to appropriate values not his own or to project needs onto an other. Similarly, art is an “extravagant pretense, exercised to secure the authority it reveals as hollow.”Google Scholar

C95: 8.Crowder, Ashby Bland. Poets and Critics, Their Means and Meanings: Including Essays on Browning, Ruskin, Stevens, Heaney, and Others. Lewiston, NY: Mellen P, 1993. ¶Collects his essays on RB and others: C74: 21, C77: 26, C82: 12, C87: 10, C89: 17, C89: 18.Google Scholar

C95: 9.Day, Lawana F. “Deception, Guidance, and Discovery in Browning's ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’.” Brooks and Humphrey, Selected Papers-2 7–14. ¶ Explores the knight's fear and his arrival at the Dark Tower thematically rather than stylistically. Like RB's other “dauntless heroes,” the knight finally faces “the horrors of his surroundings,” summoning the courage “to face and endure as real” a “disordered, meaningless world.”Google Scholar

C95: 10.De Naples, Frederick Louis. “Deadly Secrets, Dangerous Homes: Living with Sensation in the Victorian Period.” DAI 56.05 (11 1995): 1788A. U. of Pennsylvania, 1995. ¶Treats RB's The Ring and the Book.Google Scholar

C95: 11.DiMassa, Michael V. “Browning's Christmas Eve, lines 560–62.” Explicator 53.4 (Summer 1995): 201–04.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¶Observes that RB's image of bees swarming alludes to Paradise Lost I.767–76 not as a repudiation of Catholicism; instead, because the bee is also a symbol of peace and cooperation, the image enriches and complicates the poem's meaning.Google Scholar

C95: 12.Dooley, Allan C.Author and Printer in Victorian England. [See C93:11.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by Library Review 44 (May 1995): 64;Google Scholar

Small, Ian, Modern Philology 92.4 (05 1995): 516–20.Google Scholar

C95: 13.Egan, Susanna. “Glad Rags for Lady Godiva, Woman's Story as Womanstance in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh.” English Studies in Canada 20.3 (09 1994): 283–300. ¶Examines EBB's use of the image of Lady Godiva and of Danae to address ideas about marriage and prostitution and the woman artist. For both, “vulnerable nakedness becomes the source of power.” Marian and Aurora are the double focus of the poem, with Marian's rape being “central to its meaning.” The focus on women “reverses our expectations of what constitutes helplessness and vulnerability, what constitutes decency and shame…, and who is the liberator of whom.” Marian's is a “truly Romantic womanstance”: “the traditional object redefines herself as subject because she speaks not out of custom but out of her own inner conviction.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

C95: 14.Erkkila, Betsy. “Dickinson, Women Writers, and the Marketplace.” The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord. [See C92: 15.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by Rodier, Katharine, Review 17 (1995): 131–39.Google Scholar

*C95: 15.Erskine-Hill, Howard, and McCabe, Richard A., eds. Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.Google Scholar

C95: 16.Fraser, Hilary. The Victorians and Renaissance Italy. [See C94: 24.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by Levine, Philippa, Journal of Modern History 67.4 (12 1995): 910–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

C95: 17.Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Lyric Subversion of Narrative in Women's Writing: Virginia Woolf and the Tyranny of Plot.” Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology. Ed. Phelan, James. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989. 162–85. ¶Explores the relation of women's writing both to conventional narrative and to theory of narrative, notably the concept of the tyranny of the Oedipal plot. Woolf's essays and novels, especially To the Lighthouse, as well as EBB's Aurora Leigh and H. D.'s “HER,” “show how women have used lyric interruptions of narrative to resist the tyranny of dominant cultural and literary plots.” Aurora Leigh “presents a dominant narrative text and a muted lyric subtext that first support, then ultimately conflict with each other,” in its marriage plot.Google Scholar

*C95: 18.Gibson, Mary Ellis. Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.Google Scholar

C95: 19.Greer, Germaine. Slip-shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet. London: Viking, 1995. 517 pp. passim. ¶Examines the lives and work of several women poets writing before 1900, noting that “a select band of arbitrarily chosen token women… were rewarded for their failures.” EBB struggled out of this syndrome and finally produced “sometimes grotesque but unmistakable poetry” (64). With “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point,” she recognized a “female authority.” Marriage with RB, however, was “less idyllic” than usually thought; her “emotional egotism, her neuroses, and her self-destruc-tiveness defeated him in death as they had in life.”Google Scholar

Rev. by Adcock, Fleur, New Statesman and Society 8 (6 10 1995): 37–38;Google Scholar

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C95: 20.Hickok, Kathleen. “‘Intimate Egoism’: Reading and Evaluating Noncanonical Poetry by Women.” VP 33.1 (Spring 1995): 13–30. ¶Analyzes one poem each by Eliza Cook, Augusta Webster, Emily Pfeiffer, and Louisa Bevington, “relatively unknown and unregarded women poets,” to reconsider criteria for evaluating poetry. Victorian audiences were attracted by the “moral aesthetic” in EBB's poems, an appeal we can understand today.Google Scholar

C95: 21.Hines, Susan C. “A Trial Reading of Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book.” Brooks and Humphrey, Selected Papers-2 28–33. ¶Regards RB's long poem as a crime drama in which readers find themselves, albeit reluctantly, in the jury box, asked for their “rigorous attention to detail and sustained concentration.” The books each require “careful ethical deliberation,” the questions making each reader an “authorizing interpreter.” Finally, the law “as readers soon discover by way of the attorneys' display, is hardly an absolute concept but is an ambiguous creature not without its literary parallels.”Google Scholar

C95: 22.Homans, Margaret. “The Powers of Powerlessness: The Courtships of Elizabeth Barrett and Queen Victoria.” Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Ed. Keller, Lynn and Miller, Cristanne. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 237–59. ¶Examines EBB's and RB's both positioning themselves as “the lowest” in the courtship correspondence, arguing that these “symmetrical acts of humility” are not at all equal when seen through the lens of gender. For a man, this pose is “ironic or playful”; for a woman, it “is doubly ironic, and therefore potentially not ironic at all.” EBB is “an inferior posing as a superior posing as an inferior,” which is close to women's social reality. Queen Victoria and EBB are “figures who are at once exceptional and typical Victorian women.” This question may be seen most clearly in “Lady Geraldine's Courtship” and the Sonnets from the Portuguese.Google Scholar

C95: 23.Honda, Patricia Y. “Commerce and Contemplation: Economics and Art in Robert Browning, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop.” DAI 55.09 (03 1995): 2832A. Boston U. 1995.Google Scholar

C95: 24.Hudson, Gertrude Reese. Robert Browning's Literary Life: From First Work to Masterpiece. [See C93: 21.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by Lee, Erickson, Nineteenth-Century Prose 22.2 (Summer 1995): 169–76.Google Scholar

C95: 25.Ingersoll, Earl G. “Personality in Robert Browning's Dramatic Monologues.” Etudes Anglaises 48.2 (04–06 1995): 140–47. ¶Explores RB's tactic of the Duke in “My Last Duchess” focusing “his listener's attention on the visual… [while being unaware] of the more powerful seduction of the voice.” In “Fra Lippo Lippi” the visual is his face, and the captain is seduced, like many readers, by the personality he improvises.Google Scholar

C95: 26.Karlin, Daniel. Browning's Hatreds. [See C93: 24.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by Maynard, John, Review 17 (1995): 45–64;Google Scholar

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C95: 27.Kass, Thomas G. “Incarnational Tension in Robert Browning's ‘Karshish’.” American Benedictine Review 44.3 (09 1993): 236–48. ¶Finds the dramatic tension in RB's poem to be more subtle than a conflict between faith and reason or between two systems of belief. Rather, the poem's imagery and form suggest that the revelation of the mystery of incarnation is what affects Karshish, who, however, remains in the process of transformation when the poem ends.Google Scholar

C95: 28.Keats, Patrick Henry. “G. K. Chesterton and the Victorians: Dialogue, Dialectic, and Synthesis.” DAI 55.02 (08 1994): 284A. Catholic U. of America, 1994.Google Scholar

C95: 29.Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. [See C92: 43.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by Flowers, Betty Sue, Modem Philology 92.3 (02 1995): 385–90;CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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C95: 30.Leighton, Angela, and Reynolds, Margaret, eds. Introd. and notes, Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. xv–xl, 63–66. ¶Introduction I (Reynolds) reconsiders the function of literary annuals in women writers' lives, many of whom are included here. The annuals allowed the development of a “sense of professional sisterhood,” and EBB debated with RB their value, “defending them for their professional purposes, deprecating them for their compromising content.”Google Scholar

In 1858 English Woman's Journal was established to encourage women's writing for a new generation, a project that was carried on by successors to the end of the century.Google Scholar

Introduction II (Leighton) explores “the difficulties women encountered in identifying themselves as poets in a society which, on the one hand, cast them in an unremittingly sentimental mould, and, on the other, was astonished at their mere existence.” Frequent use of the mask, the picture and the mirror point to self scrutiny. Common themes were sisterhood and motherhood, as well as social consciousness and philosophical inquiry. Headnote on EBB (Leighton) describes Aurora Leigh as an “epic tale of art and love focused on the political structures of race, class and family lineage.” Aurora's quest involves constant “grappling with the realities of money, inheritance, patrilineage and sexual power.”Google Scholar

C95: 31.Logan, Deborah. “The Economics of Sexuality: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Victorian ‘Bad Conscience’.” Women's Studies 24.4 (03 1995): 293–305. ¶Follows Foucault's suggestion that Victorian literature is saturated with sexuality and politics, looking at their intersection in Aurora Leigh. EBB “critiques cultural assumptions concerning women and female sexuality,” exploring sexual control by means of “the social, class, and economic oppression of women.” The ending of the poem, however, domesticates Aurora and renders Marian invisible, reducing her “to her sexual value.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

C95: 32.Markus, Julia. Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. London: Bloomsbury; New York: Knopf, 1995. 382 pp. ¶Recounts the story of the Brownings' courtship and marriage and reads some of the poems biographically. If EBB had “mixed blood,” that may account for her strong sympathy with the abolition movement and for her father's “peculiar imagination” and opposition to his children marrying. There were occasional difficulties during the Brownings' marriage, but finally their “true accomplishment” was ‘“Knowing each other as each was.”Google Scholar

Rev. by Arnold, David, Boston Globe 11 Feb. 1995:1, 16;Google Scholar

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*C95: 33.Marucci, Franco. “Nel labirinto delle isotopie: ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ di Browning.” Semeia: Itinerariper Marcello Pagnini, ed. Innocenti, Loretta, Marucci, Franco, and Pugliatti, Paola. Bologna: Mulino, 1994.Google Scholar

C95: 34.McDonell, Jennifer Ann. “Victorian Polemic and the Poetics of the Feminine Subject: Robert Browning, Pompilia, and The Ring and the Book.” DAI 56.06 (12 1995): 2250A. U. of Sydney, 1995.Google Scholar

C95: 35.McNally, James. “Browning and Allingham and Aspects of Symbiosis.” Brooks and Humphrey, Selected Papers-2 70–76. ¶Observes that Allingham's Diary shows the other writer to have been an admirer whose support came “in the early middle of Browning's career, at a time when Browning stood most in need of those.” The friendship, sustained over many years, allowed RB to refine “his own ideas of literary execution and toning through exchanges with a fellow practitioner who… was less and less a rival.”Google Scholar

C95: 36.Mermin, Dorothy. “‘The fruitful feud of hers and his’: Sameness, Difference, and Gender in Victorian Poetry.” VP 33.1 (Spring 1995): 149–68. ¶Explores ways male and female poets “struggled against the traditionally gendered system of poetic difference,” citing a number of EBB's poems, as well as Christina Rossetti's and Matthew Arnold's. In terms of “the status of the speaking subject,” revisions of conventional roles that posit an androgynous ideal, the question of who is speaker and who the object of speaking, we may see that “in some important sense all the Victorian poets, male and female, can be read as women.”Google Scholar

C95: 37.Mermin, Dorothy. Godiva's Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880. [See C93: 39.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by Broomfield, Andrea L., Nineteenth-Century Prose 22.1 (Spring 1995): 132–35;Google Scholar

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C95: 38.Millgate, Michael. Testamentary Acts. [See C92: 54.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by Clarke, Lorrie, English Studies in Canada 21 (1995): 475–77;CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Moseley, Merritt, Sewanee Review 103 (04–06 1995): 309–13;Google Scholar

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C95: 39.Monteiro, George. “Camoes' ‘Minor Poems’: A Reference in a Letter to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Notes and Queries 42 (06 1995): 189. ¶Identifies a reference in the Brownings' Correspondence (R. H. Horne to EBB, 28 June 1844) to Luis de Camoes' “minor poems” as his “so-called lírica (‘lyric’ poems),” translated into English by Strangford (1803).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

C95: 40.Myrick, Lynn. “The Poem as Sacrament: The Poetics of Robert Browning and Emily Dickinson.” Brooks and Humphrey, Selected Papers-2 77–87. ¶Examines three aspects of the poetic process that RB and ED shared: 1) the use of geometric terms to describe “the attaining of vision,” 2) “the use of imperfect materials found in everyday life” to impart that vision to the reader by means of a circuitous route, or “telling the truth slant,” and 3) the belief that “a putting of the infinite into the finite” gives the poem “a sacramental value.” The artist “who breathes life into the body of art” reenacts the Incarnation, a miracle.Google Scholar

C95: 41.Newton, Jean Mandelbaum. “Vision and Music: Poetic Theory and Conflict in the Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” DAI 55.11 (05 1995): 3523A. City U. of New York, 1994.Google Scholar

C95: 42.O'Neill, Patricia. Robert Browning and Twentieth-Century Criticism. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995. 157 pp. ¶Traces the literary scholarship and criticism on RB over the last century and attempts to answer the question “why read Browning?” Such a history suggests RB's “vitality as a poet and his enduring ability to reflect our own aesthetic, moral and social concerns.” The volume of criticism recently “has been tremendous and the issues of critical methodology complicated.”Google Scholar

C95: 43.Pathak, Pratul. The Infinite Passion of Finite Hearts: Robert Browning and Failure in Love. [See C92: 65.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by Maynard, John, Review 17 (1995): 45–64.Google Scholar

C95: 44.Pollock, George W. “‘Ivan Ivanovitch’ and Dramatic Idyls Revisited: A Reassessment of Browning's Later Career.” Brooks, and Humphrey, , Selected Papers-2 88–96. ¶Urges a reconsideration of RB's later poems. “Ivan Ivanovitch” especially “ranks with the very finest of Browning's dramatic poetry of the short mode and is a microcosm of the aging poet's later crowning achievement in narrator-persona and aesthetic distance from subject matter.” RB does not just renew the dramatic impulse here but breaks new ground. He deals “with thorny psychological and spiritual problems… even more complex and more profound” than in his famous earlier dramatic monologues.Google Scholar

C95: 45.Porée, Marc. “Petites etudes sur le désir de voir dans Men and Women.” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 42 (11 1995): 75–89. ¶Explores the visual and the visible in RB's fifty pairs of eyes in these poems, looking, seeing, interpreting, and also being regarded by a reader. A poet of voice and verbal texture, he was equally the poet of the eye, as can be seen especially in “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Popularity,” and “One Word More.” In French.Google Scholar

C95: 46.Ryals, Clyde de L.The Life of Robert Browning. [See C93: 47.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by Erickson, Lee, Nineteenth-Century Prose 22 (Summer 1995): 169–76;Google Scholar

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C95: 47.Shires, Linda M. “The Author as Spectacle and Commodity: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas Hardy.” Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination. Ed. Christ, Carol T. and Jordan, John O.. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 198–212. ¶Takes EBB and Hardy as endpoints of an evolution of literary authority from regarding writing as a vocation to seeing the artist's life as a profession. In the shift from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the author became a public figure, a spectacle. Both EBB and Hardy confront “the need to shape the self through display but also to remain somehow sincere” and to control representations of themselves. Her two sonnets to George Sand and “Lord Walter's Wife” are considered.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

C95: 48.Smulders, Sharon. “Sincere Doubt Doubtful Sincerity, and Sonnets from the Portuguese 37.” American Notes and Queries 8.4 (Fall 1995): 18–23. ¶Discusses ways EBB overcame “the sonnet's generic prescriptiveness” by conflating and destabilizing a common Elizabethan trope, the shipwreck and tempestuous sea, and deals with the problem of “sincere doubt.” Sonnet 37 is the “last poem to examine love through the lens of doubt.” The following poems critique the “conventional construction of desire as ‘fit to shift and break,’” focusing on “the problems of aesthetic representation” rather than addressing the beloved's sincerity.Google Scholar

C95: 49.Stephenson, Mimosa, and Stephenson, William A.. “‘A Forgiveness’ and Its Implications for a Study of Robert Browning's Poetry.” Brooks and Humphrey, Selected Papers-2 21–27. ¶View a poem RB chose as one of four to represent him, “A Forgiveness,” as a Gothic horror story rather than a tragedy. The central character is not noble or even human. Such fascination with evil reveals RB to have a “basic deficiency of forgiveness,” although he has been “claimed for the most part to be Christian.”Google Scholar

C95: 50.Stone, Marjorie. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. 254 pp. ¶Resituates EBB's works in their historical context, at the juncture of Romanticism and Victorianism, and deconstructs the legend of the romantic rescue, reconstructing her life as a writer. In her own time, her canon had “prominence and influence,” revealing “strikingly different presuppositions concerning generic categories, period boundaries and traditions of writers than those that prevailed in our own century.” Her use of a dramatic speaker and of the ballad form are notable. A proper study of the reception of her works includes memoirs, obituaries, reviews, anthologies, as well as critical studies, because she transformed so many lives and minds, especially those of “apparently insignificant girls.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Rev. by Stephenson, M. S., Choice 32.11–12 (06–08 1995): 1732.Google Scholar

C95: 51.Sullivan, Mary Rose. “Browning as ‘New Age’ Thinker in ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ and ‘A Death in the Desert’.” Brooks and Humphrey, Selected Papers-2 53–62. ¶Examines two of RB's poems in terms of contemporary evolutionary thought as articulated by Gary Zukav—“the basis of evolutionary progress [lies] in ethical choices of individual humans.” Caliban may be seen as one of those “incomplete egos who mask their sense of inferiority by feeding on those weaker than themselves”; he prefers “to maintain the status quo through manipulation and role-playing rather than to take on the demanding task of developing his ‘true self’ or ‘soul.’” In contrast, John the Evangelist sees that growth comes through internal power… enjoyed by the fully-human being who has achieved self-control and self-transcendence.”Google Scholar

C95: 52.Sussman, Herbert. “The Problematic of a Masculine Poetic: Robert Browning.” Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 73–110. ¶Expands discussion (C92: 92) of RB's “ambivalence toward bourgeois manhood” in the male artist poems “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto.” In “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” RB examines “the enforced containment of male desire,” which is extended in “The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's,” connecting the distortions of monastic celibacy to the practice of art. “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning” show him oscillating between “the attraction of male-male ties and the pull of heterosexual union.” “Saul” “most clearly brings to the surface the homoeroticism implicit in the male-male bonds within a masculine poetic.”Google Scholar

C95: 53.Tucker, Herbert F.“Aurora Leigh: Epic Solutions to Novel Ends.” Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure. Ed. Alison Booth. [See C94: 65.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by Campbell, Jane, International Fiction Review 22 (1995): 101–02.Google Scholar

C95: 54.Vann, J. Don. “The Power of Innocence: Pippa and Oliver Twist.” Brooks and Humphrey, Selected Papers-2 63–69. ¶Reads RB's Pippa Passes and Dickens's Oliver Twist “in light of two important themes of English romantic writers: the fascination with childhood and the benevolent influence of nature.” Both writers expand this inheritance from Blake and Wordsworth to show characters carrying a “divine quality” that unconsciously affects those around them.Google Scholar

C95: 55.Waddington, Patrick. From The Russian Fugitive to The Ballad of Bulgarie: Episodes in English Literary Attitudes to Russia From Wordsworth to Swinburne. [See C94: 70.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by Times Literary Supplement 2 June 1995: 26.Google Scholar

C95: 56.Wallace, Anne D.Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century. [See C94: 71.]Google Scholar

¶Rev. by McGill, Allyson F., VS 38 (Summer 1995): 611–13.Google Scholar

C95: 57.Waller, Randall L. “Browning's Dueling Cleric: The Rhetoric of ‘Bishop Blougram's Apology’.” Brooks and Humphrey, Selected Papers-2 15–20. ¶Views RB's Bishop as a “Victorian gentleman” who gains his satisfaction from Gigadibs' challenge by using tactics from forensic rhetoric in a pattern that resembles “a fencing duel.” His wide array of strategies of persuasion also form a pattern of retreat, parry, and attack. In retreat he “falls back on appeals to his audience's values (ethos)”; in parry he ‘“appeals to logic (logos)”; in attack he “appeals to the emotions (pathos).” RB thus emphasizes rhetoric as “a primary, non-violent means by which human society arrives at major decisions.”Google Scholar

C95: 58.Weir, Mary Ellen. “‘Men call me chaste’: A Feminine Redefinition of Androcentric Chastity in Medieval, Renaissance, and Nineteenth Century British Texts.” DAI 55.09 (03 1995): 2847A. U. of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1994. ¶Includes EBB.Google Scholar

C95: 59.White, Leslie. “Browning and His Audience: ‘A Battle with the Age’.” Brooks and Humphrey, Selected Papers-2 34–52. ¶Regards RB's relationship with his public as “anguished and antagonistic.” He was “suspended between the Romantic vision of the artist as prophet-seer and the mid-Victorian demand that he/she get into productive communication with a public eager for edification and a little entertainment.” In the end, his audience was “complex and diverse enough to push Browning beyond comfortable limits.” He was able “to stay just out of reach and thus to slide over its unconscious desire to make of him a counselor, a virtuoso, or worse, an autocratic, avuncular moralist.” The intelligibility that readers wished for was, however, “a seductive promise.”Google Scholar

C95: 60.Woodall, Natalie Joy. “The Appropriation of the Medieval Motif by Nineteenth-century Women Writers.” DAI 55.08 (02 1995): 2411A. Syracuse U., 1994. ¶Includes EBB.Google Scholar

C95: 61.Woolford, John. “Elizabeth Barrett and the Wordsworthian Sublime.” Essays in Criticism 45.1 (01 1995): 36–56. ¶Explores EBB's engagement with the Romantic ideas of the double and the sublime, as well as “two Wordsworthian topoi, the valorising of Nature and nostalgia for childhood.” Her attitude toward him, at first admiring, became ambivalent. She later revised her perception of him and of herself as a female poet in a male tradition and “moved away from sublime poetics.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar