Public image and private self in Rousseau and Browning

This article examines how Browning used Rousseau’s confessional aesthetics as a point of reference when defining his own poetics

A poet's self-observation Robert Browning's poems in propria persona

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Dramatic monologue, detective fiction and the search for meaning

This essay compares the genres of the dramatic monologue and detective fiction in terms of their contemporaneous development and respective reading processes. Drawing on narratological categories, it examines the emphasis in both genres on the withholding of information and the stimulation of the reader’s desire to establish meaning and exert judgment. Despite these similarities in the reading process, the genres’ epistemologies seem opposed: the relativist dramatic monologue clearly challenges the belief in absolute meaning, while the classic detective formula depicts the problematic process of arriving at an apparently unambiguous truth. On a subtler analysis, however, detective fiction echoes and diversifies the dramatic monologue’s questioning of stable meaning. Both genres explore questions of relativism, both invite their readers to engage in modes of investigative reasoning and a problematized process of “solving,” and both can be read as critiquing the literature of subjectivity and reflecting the transgression of norms in a society where key values are shifting. Considering the origins of both genres, the essay asks whether a further relationship might derive from the debt that their founding figures, Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Browning, owe to the Gothic and from their shared interest in the individual psyche

British satirical poems and cartoons about Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte: Deconstructing authenticity and aura

This article draws on opposing cultural concepts of authenticity and imitation, combined with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aura, to examine the self-promotion of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as successor of Napoleon I. The article confronts Louis-Napoleon’s strategy of self-promotion with the criticism it attracted in British satirical cartoons and poems. Louis-Napoleon constructs a public image laying claim to the aura of his uncle as Romantic hero; conversely, his critics exploit the same imagery to ridicule him as an inferior imitator. They reject both the idea that aura is transferable and the concept of authenticity based on external authority (via dynastic lineage) in favour of one located in the original, unique self. The article explores the paradox that, while attacking Louis-Napoleon for his inauthenticity, caricatures and parodies are themselves reliant on imitation. It contends that this paradox arises from the genres’ transitional position between historically and culturally divergent ways of perceiving the original and the copy

Browning, Victorian poetics and the Romantic legacy: Challenging the Romantic voice

Taking an original approach to Robert Browning’s poetics, Britta Martens focuses on a corpus of relatively neglected poems in Browning’s own voice in which he reflects on his poetry, his self-conceptualisation and his place in the poetic tradition. She analyses his work in relation to Romanticism, Victorian reactions to the Romantic legacy, and wider nineteenth-century changes in poetic taste, to argue that in these poems, as in his more frequently studied dramatic monologues, Browning deploys varied dramatic methods of self-representation, often critically and ironically exposing the biases and limitations of the seemingly authoritative speaker ‘Browning’. The poems thus become devices for Browning’s detached evaluation of his own and of others’ poetics, an evaluation never fully explicit but presented with elusive economy for the astute reader to interpret. The confrontation between the personal authorial voice and the dramatic voice in these poems provides revealing insights into the poet’s highly self-conscious, conflicted and sustained engagement with the Romantic tradition and the diversely challenging reader expectations that he faces in a post-Romantic age. As the Victorian most rigorous in his rejection of Romantic self-expression, Browning is a key transitional figure between the sharply antagonistic periods of Romanticism and Modernism. He is also, as Martens persuasively demonstrates, a poet of complex contradictions and an illuminating case study for addressing the perennial issues of voice, authorial authority and self-reference

From the execution ballad to the dramatic monologue: Criminal confession reconfigured

Victorian dramatic monologues about murder, including such prominent examples as Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover,” “My Last Duchess,” and The Ring and the Book, as well as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “A Last Confession,” often rely upon readers’ familiarity with the popular genre of the execution ballad. Subverting the straightforward plotline and deterrent social function of the primarily didactic ballad, these monologues shift the reader’s horizon of expectation towards greater psychological sophistication and moral ambiguity, obliging them to contemplate a world in which crime may go unpunished and social order is fragile