Rossetti, Dante Gabriel

How was music depicted in and mediated through Romantic and Victorian poetry? This is the central question that this specially commissioned volume of essays sets out to explore in order to better understand music’s place and significance in nineteenth-century British culture. Analyzing how music took part in and commented on a wide range of scientific, literary and cultural discourses, the book expands our knowledge of how music was central to the nineteenth-century imagination. Our study provides a meeting place for literary studies and musicology, with contributions by scholars situated in each field.

Contents: Introduction, Phyllis Weliver; (1) Scotch Drink & Irish Harps: Mediations of the National Air, Celeste Langan; (2) “Suspended” Sense in Alastor: Shelley’s Musical Trope and 18th-century Medical Discourse, Kimiyo Ogawa; (3) On Music Framed: The Eolian Harp in Romantic Writing, Susan Bernstein; (4) Music and Inspiration in Blake’s Poetry, John Hughes; (5) “Music their larger soul”: George Eliot’s “The Legend of Jubal” and Victorian Musicality, Ruth A. Solie; (6) Musical Reactions to Tennyson: Reformulating Musical Imagery in “The Lotos-Eaters,” Michael Allis; (7) “Monna Innominata” and Christina Rossetti’s Audible Unhappiness, Yeo Wei Wei; (8) The “silent song” of D.G. Rossetti’s The House of Life, Phyllis Weliver; (9) “The Music Spoke for Us”: Music and Sexuality in Fin-de-Siècle Poetry, Emma Sutton; (10) Sappho Recomposed: A Song Cycle by Granville and Helen Bantock, Yopie Prins

At the time Walters 38.419 entered the museum in 1963 with a significant gift of portrait miniatures the flame-haired subject was identified as Elizabeth Siddall—a significant Pre-Raphaelite artist, poet and model who married Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This identification is attested by an engraved inscription on the back of the portrait's magnificent jeweled frame, which was added on the instruction of previous owner, John Pierpont Morgan in about 1906. This paper uncovers the involvement of the art critic and miniature expert George Charles Williamson in both the design of the frame, the identification of the sitter as Siddall, and the attribution of the over-painting to Rossetti.

Friedrich Kittler’s media history is rarely employed by humanities scholars, who are often alienated by his disregard for literary content or humanistic concerns. This article makes the case for engaging with Kittler’s theories as a natural extension of the materialist turn common to a number of humanities disciplines. Here, I assemble a toolkit from Kittler’s ideas of recursion and transposition, and the study of cultural techniques that has flowed from his works, in order to propose a new way to conceive of ekphrasis and approach ekphrastic verse. I position ekphrasis as an informative example of recursion in action. I compare Kittler’s media history—and the insights yielded by the tools it offers us—to some of the most influential studies of ekphrasis and ekphrases, showing how a Kittlerian approach can shine new light on the genre. I also offer a short illustrative example of applying these tools to ekphrastic work by analysing Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘A Sea Spell’, by which I also hope to demonstrate how Kittler’s ideas can assist twenty-first-century scholars in bridging the gap between our own medial situation and those in which our objects of study were produced.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones enjoyed regular patronage from a variety of middle-class patrons, such as William Graham and Frederick Leyland. However, such support came with drawbacks; Burne-Jones complained of being a ‘slave’ to Leyland and Rossetti described his relationship to patrons as that of a ‘whore’. These figurations speak of the dilemma the nineteenth-century male artist faced in the Victorian marketplace, a concern shared by literary artists too, for example Browning in his artist poems. Focusing on self-perceptions by Victorian artists, as well as poetic representations of artists by Victorian writers and didactic commentaries about artists by authors such as Samuel Smiles, this article explores the various tropes used for imagining the male artist in relation to the challenges of the contemporary marketplace. It focuses in particular on concerns about the emasculation of the artist and the gendering of issues such as artistic freedom versus commodification.

« Dans une lettre datée du 3 janvier 1891, William Morris évoque une « petite aventure typographique en préparation ». L’idée, modeste en apparence, va prendre une ampleur insoupçonnée. »

Comment changer la société et réenchanter le livre ? William Morris, scandalisé par la laideur des livres de l’époque victorienne, entend y parvenir en créant des livres inactuels et néo-gothiques, non pas simples pastiches des siècles passés mais inspirés des manuscrits médiévaux et des premiers incunables de sa bibliothèque personnelle. Livres qui, selon lui, doivent tendre vers la perfection et incarner l’idéal voulu par John Ruskin, à l’image de l’une des plus merveilleuses réalisations du private press movement, le magistral et testamentaire Kelmscott Chaucer, décrit par le peintre préraphaélite Burne-Jones comme une « cathédrale de poche ».

« En fait, un livre, qu’il soit imprimé ou manuscrit, tend tout simplement à être un bel objet, et, le fait qu’à notre époque nous produisions couramment des livres laids prouve assez, je le crains, une intention criminelle, une détermination à garder les yeux fermés en toute occasion. »

Florence Alibert offre ici de découvrir ou de redécouvrir au fil de la vie et des œuvres de l'artiste, la dernière croisade du peintre, dessinateur, homme politique, poète, architecte et imprimeur William Morris, qui séduira nombre de créateurs britanniques, belges ou allemands et ne donnera lieu en France qu’à de timides et partielles expérimentations. Cathédrale et imprimé fusionnent, le livre, à la conception architecturale, devient un tout harmonieux. Et alors qu’il l’évoque parfois avec légèreté, la « petite aventure typographique » de Morris, devenue projet de plus grande envergure, se pose comme une enclave possible contre les conventions de la modernité : « Je voulais imprimer quelques beaux livres. Et je voulais m’amuser. Et je peux dire que j’ai fait les deux. »

« Le 2 juin 1896, Morris, alors très malade, voire mourant, reçut le premier exemplaire de son cher Chaucer qui avait à la fois contribué à le maintenir en vie et à l’épuiser complètement. Sa fille May note au sujet de son père : « il avait l’air profondément mélancolique. Il se retourna vers moi et me sourit tendrement mais semblait se perdre déjà dans une très lointaine contrée […] et tout fut fini quelques temps plus tard. »

Eds. Dinah Roe and Serena Trowbridge. Forthcoming 2020. Solicited.

In the last years of his life, Dante Gabriel Rossetti provided a bit of advice to Thomas Hall Craine: “Conception, my boy, fundamental brainwork, that is what makes all the difference in art.”  Included in this demand for intellectuality in poetry, I argue that Rossetti incorporates the brainwork of community, of deriving creative inspiration from his fraternity. Intellectuality, for Rossetti, is founded on a collaborative sense of creation: the intimacy of shared thought and liberal exchange.

By imagining the lyric’s future in 1870, Rossetti established a way forward for the materiality of poetry through aural and visual rhythm and “culturally resonant form,” as Elizabeth Helsinger has recently argued.  By tracing the creative process in the archival drafts of “Eden Bower,” I demonstrate the intellectual ardor and creative exertion contained within each of Rossetti’s poems. I posit that such a process becomes embedded in his prosody (or affective music of verse), particularly, as this article will explore, the rhythm of the refrain ballads in the first part of Poems. In doing so, I suggest that Poems offers a response akin to William Morris’s usage of the performative lyric as a transformation of collective, social fellowship, while providing, also, a framework for defining the lyric potential of Pre-Raphaelite poetics.

It is well recognized that Rossetti sought advice and suggestions from friends and fellow poets at every stage in the creation and publication of Poems. And yet, there has been little attention given to Rossetti’s responses when offered those recommendations. Preserved within the archive, Rossetti’s material response to these suggestions can be witnessed in his revisions to his poetry. By analyzing these drafts alongside the correspondence, I demonstrate the ways in which Rossetti’s lyric form and innovation is indebted to fraternal brainwork. “I hardly ever do produce a sonnet except on some basis of special momentary emotion,” wrote Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Bell Scott on 25 August 1871. “But I think there is another class admissible also—and that is the only other I practice […which is dependent] on a line or two clearly given you, you know not whence, and calling up a sequence of ideas.”  As part of his experimental poetics, Rossetti integrates this fraternal exchange of ideas as a way of shaping and reinventing lyric matter.

In 1887, Parisian editor Alphonse Lemerre published the first French translation of Dante-Gabriel Rossetti's collection of sonnets The House of Life. Quite unexpectedly and upon Mrs Couve's explicit initiative, the poems are put into French both " literally and literarily " : a prose version appears on the same page as the verse translation, as if the translator intended to experiment both ways to find the most adequate. This paper will question some traditionally accepted beliefs on translation (according which, for instance, a prose translation should be semantically more " faithful " to the original than a versified one) and suggest a new interpretation of this unusual translative gesture in the light of French fin-de-siècle poetics.

Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new genre of periodicals in which to propagate their principles and circulate their work. Such periodicals are known as ‘little magazines’ for their small-scale production and their circulation among limited audiences, and during the late Victorian period they were often conceptualized as integrated designs or total works of art in order to visually and materially represent the ideals of their producers. Little magazines like the Pre-Raphaelite Germ, the Arts & Crafts Hobby Horse and the Decadent Yellow Book launched the careers of innovative authors and artists and provided a site for debate between minor contributors and visiting grandees from Matthew Arnold to Oscar Wilde. This book offers detailed discussions of the background to thirteen major little magazines of the Victorian era, both situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative items, in doing so, it outlines the earliest history of this enduring publication genre, and of the Aesthetic Movement that developed along with it.


Key Features:
----------------------
* First monograph to focus on the origins and development of the little magazine genre during the Victorian period
* Each chapter provides a representative introduction to the respective little magazines
* Combines new insights with a critical overview of the state of the art on each discussed little magazine

Table of contents
----------------------------
Introduction
1. The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
2. Mounting the (Century Guild) Hobby Horse
3. The Little Magazine as a Periodical Portfolio: the Dial, the Pagan Review and the Page
4. Selling the Yellow Nineties: the Yellow Book and the Savoy
5. Politicised Aestheticism outside London: the Quest and the Evergreen
6. Little Excursions Outside the Avant-Garde: the Pageant, the Parade and the Dome
(In)conclusions

“Il prossimo Keats potrebbe solo dipingere”: con queste parole Dante Gabriel Rossetti paga il suo più grande tributo al poeta di Hampstead. Ed è senz’altro significativo come, a sua volta, lo stesso Keats avesse eletto a padre poetico il cosiddetto “Painter of the Poets”, Edmund Spenser. Il binomio pittura-poesia vincola i nomi di Keats e Rossetti più di quanto la produzione dell’ultimo non paia dimostrare. Il mio articolo intende dunque indagare la natura di simile vincolo, rilevando come ad accomunare i poeti in questione sia una profonda crisi della rappresentazione artistica: crisi che affonda le radici nella caduta del poeta romantico in uno stato di disperata self-consciousness, e che si vede di seguito esasperata nell’interminabile fuga degli interpretanti che caratterizza la produzione del vittoriano. Di fronte all’incolmabile vuoto di significato che è intervenuto a dividere il trinomio Agostiniano di Dio, Natura e Uomo, Keats e Rossetti si appigliano alla concretezza dell’oggetto estetico quale estrema forma di sincerità artistica, capace di
mettere a nudo l’incommensurabile isolamento di un solipsistico e tardivo “io” poetico. È nel capolavoro preraffaellita ante-litteram di Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes”, che intendo rintracciare i semi della più matura poetica rossettiana: dal grottesco romantico che in esso si celebra al suo caratteristico pittorialismo à-la-Spenser, il poema di Keats spiana
la strada al culto rossettiano per un’arte concepita quale ritualistico atto di attenzione, ripetizione e traduzione.

Presentation at NAVSA 2018. October 11-14, 2018

Victorian photography is en vogue.  Recent London exhibitions have demonstrated the centrality of the technological medium and Victorian usage of the photographic lens. Photography enables a “looking outward” and formulates an artistic and experimental vision of the Victorian world. The National Portrait Gallery’s current Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography is the first exhibition to examine the relationship between photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Lady Clementina Hawarden, and Oscar Rejlander. It showcases how these figures, according to the exhibition catalog, “formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future.”  Defying earlier conventions of stiff, dull portraiture, mid-century Victorian photographers turned the medium into an art form.  Perhaps this is why prior exhibitions, like the Tate’s Painting with Light (2016), explored the visual connections between photographs and British art movements, including Pre-Raphaelite, aesthetic, and impressionist works. Yet while recent attention has been given to the links between photography and painting, what of the connections between nineteenth-century photography and poetry?

This presentation seeks to illuminate the connections between art photography and Pre-Raphaelite poetry. It draws from the photographic process of Julia Margaret Cameron and her poem “On a Portrait” (1875; 1876) in addition to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s usage of photography as an aid to his art and the revisionary process of his so-called “double works.” I argue that we ought to view literary Pre-Raphaelitism as innovatively experimental, and reliant upon a revived focus on the creative process, revealed in the archive. William Bell Scott’s famous claim that “the seed of the flower of Pre-Raphaelitism was photography,” is often connected to the detail of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Such painting emulates the camera’s perfection, transforming John Everett Millais’ Ophelia into the exact image of Lizzie Siddal drowning. But what could this claim mean for Pre-Raphaelite poetry? I suggest that the photographic medium energized Pre-Raphaelite poetic style by allowing the poet to look and feel outward: to blur the boundaries between the domestic and the foreign in a way that was both defiant and innocuous. As pioneers of experimentalism, known for subversion of form and convention, these artists also play it safe by using the displacement of the photographic lens to depict foreign subjects within a supremely British context.

Turning to the revisionary processes of these Pre-Raphaelite artists, revealed in the archives of the British Library and Victoria & Albert Museum, this presentation will look beyond the traditional literary canon to focus on the “unfinished.” By questioning the definition of a “finished” product, my project establishes the symbiotic relationship among literary drafts, artistic sketches, and finalized art. Investigating the multimodal processes of Cameron and Rossetti as a continual perfection of style and aesthetic perception aligns with a view of literary Pre-Raphaelitism as experimental. I argue for a revived focus on the creative process to show the influences of varied mediums—poetry, painting, photography—upon a single work by contributing to an understanding of the photographic imagination’s centrality to Pre-Raphaelite poetic form.

This article is a study on La Saulaie, an incomplete work by Debussy, based on a text of Dante-Gabriel Rossetti (Willowwood). The English text was translated by Pierre Louÿs. We only know the first three pages of that work (pages reproduced in facsimile and also transcribed).

Głównym celem tekstu jest interpretacja pieśni Death in Love Ralpha Vaughana Williamsa w kontekście zależności między tekstowym pierwowzorem Dantego Gabriela Rossettiego a muzyczną realizacją. Metoda badania tych związków zgodna jest z założeniami interpretacji integralnej Mieczysława Tomaszewskiego zawartymi – w odniesieniu do pieśni – w pracy Od wyznania do wołania. Studia nad pieśnią romantyczną. Kierując się specyfiką opracowania Vaughana Williamsa, wiernego poezji, autorka wychodzi od interpretacji znaczeń i budowy tekstu. Dopiero w jego kontekście interpretuje elementy muzyczne pieśni.

The main purpose of this article is to interpret the relationship between Dante Gabriel Rosseti’s poem and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ music in song Death in Love. Methodological frame is consistent with Mieczysław Tomaszewski’s integral interpretation method presented in, in respect of song, Od wyznania do wołania. Studia nad pieśnią romantyczną (From a confession to a call. A study of Romantic song). Considering Vaughan Williams’ faithfulness to the poetic source, author begins from interpretation of the poem itself. Then she interprets musical layer of Death in Love in strict relation to the text.