• General Materials
• Albert D. Pionke (bio)

In this year of pandemic library closures, frustrated interlibrary loan requests, and nonexistent campus mail service, four books are featured in the general materials section. All monographs, each manifests an interest in the intersection of literary form with aesthetic, intellectual, material, political, regional, or theological history.

Identifying a “key role” for the “nineteenth-century study of language” in the “emergence of popular sovereignty” during the period between the First (1832) and Third (1884) Reform Acts, Barbara Barrow’s Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry: Political Dialects (London: Routledge, 2019) proposes that Victorian poetry’s “lack of orderliness, its passages where poetic language spills over or exceeds its meter or formal confines,” be understood as philologically inflected interventions designed “to make visible the blind spots and exclusion of liberal reform” (p. 2). Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language (1861)—which asserts a concurrence between political revolution and linguistic rejuvenation—provides an initial warrant for the book’s “nexus between language, philology, and politics,” itself first explored by means, not of a poem, but of Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 “experimental epic in prose,” The French Revolution (pp. 5, 6). Barrow retraces the text’s at times stylistically excessive engagement with the Revolution-era theories of language articulated within John Horne Tooke’s The Diversions of Purley (1786), Noah Webster’s Dissertations on the English Language (1789) and “Preface” to An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Panorama of Paris (1781–1788) and The New Paris (1789), arguing that “Carlyle’s positioning of the revolutionaries as a source of untapped, embodied potential paradoxically sets the terms for a Victorian conception of the modern polity” (p. 23).

Poetic responses to Carlyle’s example, to later iterations of philological theory, and to the politics of ongoing franchise reform occupy the book’s four chapters, each of which addresses carefully selected works by one of the period’s major poets. Chapter 1 focuses on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s incorporation of the language theories of John Locke and Étienne de Condillac in An [End Page 315] Essay on Mind (1826), A Drama of Exile (1844), and, most importantly, Aurora Leigh (1856) in order to create “a bodiless poetry as a symbolic expression of women’s exclusion from the reformed electorate” (p. 33). Chapter 2 then reinterprets Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) as a “challenge [to] the democratic pretenses of mid-Victorian philology” during the period of the Second Reform Act (1867) and Richard Chenevix Trench’s early work on what would eventually become the Oxford English Dictionary (p. 70). According to Barrow, Browning “refuses any easy consensus of the demos as imagined by Trench, showing how forms of mass consensus can perpetuate a dangerous and deadly collectivity—as in the growth of empire—as well as overlook those subjects still excluded from the political and social benefits of the reforming state” (p. 88). In chapter 3, Barrow devotes prolonged attention to Alfred Tennyson’s Maud (1855) and Idylls of the King (1859–1885), arguing that through “sound patterns, metonymic substitutions, and lupine and canine imagery, Tennyson subtly challenges the use of philology and evolutionary science as a model for British imperial sovereignty” (p. 95). The line between human and animal language appears increasingly porous in both works, exposing, in Maud, “the irresolvable crisis of Victorian class relations,” and, in Idylls, “the advent and decline of empire as a cycle of evolution from, and degeneration into, brutes” (p. 109). Finally, chapter 4 argues that Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Poems (1898) and Poems of the Past and Present (1901) “challenge the metropolitan appropriation of rural speechways into a unified vision of the nation that followed the passage of the 1884 Reform Act” (p. 127). Barrow’s short reading of “Her Dilemma” (pp. 136–137) provides what is, perhaps, the book’s best example of the interanimating relationship between metrical irregularity, word choice, and an inferable resistance to both contemporary philological theory and overly optimistic assessments of the effects of electoral reform. Whether a wider selection of poems and/or poets would sustain the correspondence between Victorian...

• 一般材料
• 阿尔伯特·D·皮翁克（生物）

在今年大流行的图书馆关闭，沮丧的馆际互借请求以及不存在的校园邮件服务的情况下，“一般资料”部分精选了四本书。所有专着都对文学形式与美学，知识，物质，政治，地区或神学历史的交汇表现出兴趣。

在第一次（1832年）和第三次（1884年）改革法案，芭芭拉·巴罗（Barbara Barrow）的《科学，语言和改革》之间，确定“十九世纪的语言研究”在“出现主权”中的“关键作用” 。维多利亚时代的诗：政治方言（伦敦：Routledge，2019年）提出，维多利亚时代的诗“缺乏秩序性，诗语言溢出或超出其计量范围或形式界限的段落，”应理解为旨在“使盲人可见”的语言学干预。发现和排除自由改革”（第2页）。马克斯·穆勒（MaxMüller）关于语言科学的演讲（1861）断言政治革命和语言复兴之间的并存，为该书的“语言，语言学和政治之间的联系”提供了初步保证，该书本身首先不是通过诗歌而是通过托马斯·卡莱尔（Thomas Carlyle）的1837年探索的。散文中的实验性史诗”，《法国大革命》（第5、6页）。巴罗有时会追溯文本在样式上与约翰·霍恩·托克（John Horne Tooke）的《普雷改名》（The Purversions of Purley，1786），诺亚·韦伯斯特（Noah Webster）的《英语论文》（1789年）和《美国词典》的“序言”所表达的语言过度接触。英语（1828），以及路易斯·塞巴斯蒂安·梅西耶（Louis-SébastienMercier）的《巴黎全景》（1781-1788）和《新巴黎》（1789年）论证说：“凯雷将革命者定位为未开发者的来源，体现了自相矛盾的潜力，为维多利亚时代的现代政体概念设定了条件”（第23页）。

对凯雷的榜样，对后来的语言学理论的反复以及对进行中的特许经营改革的政治的诗意回应占据了本书的四章，每一章都针对该时期一位主要诗人精心挑选的作品。第1章重在伊丽莎白勃朗宁在洛克和艾蒂安德孔狄亚克的语言理论结合的 [尾页315] 征文心灵（1826），流亡的戏剧（1844年），以及最重要的是，极光利（1856 ）以创作“无体诗，作为妇女从改革后的选民中被排斥的象征性表达”（第33页）。然后第二章重新解释了罗伯特·布朗宁的《指环与书》（1868年至1869年）是《第二次改革法案》（1867年）和理查德·谢内维克斯·海伦（Richard Chenevix Trench）早期对最终成为《牛津英语词典》的著作的挑战（对[维多利亚中中期民主学的民主色彩提出挑战] 。 70）。据巴罗，勃朗宁“拒绝任何容易达成共识演示由海沟像想象中，表现出的质量共识形式如何延续危险和致命的集体，在增长帝国以及忽视这些主题仍从政治中排除和改革国家的社会利益”（第88页）。在第3章中，巴罗长期关注阿尔弗雷德·坦尼森（Alfred Tennyson）的《莫德（Maud）（1855）》和《国王的田园诗》（1859年至1885年），坦尼森（Tennyson）通过“声音模式，转喻替代以及羽扇豆和犬科动物的形象，巧妙地挑战了将语言学和进化科学用作英国帝国主权的典范”（第95页）。人类和动物语言之间的界线在这两部作品中显得越来越疏漏，在莫德（Maud）暴露出“维多利亚时代阶级关系的无法解决的危机”，在艾德斯（Idylls）暴露出“帝国的来临和衰落是从进化到退化的一个循环。变成野蛮人”（第109页）。最后，第四章认为托马斯·哈迪的《威塞克斯诗》（1898年）和《过去与现在的诗》（1901）“在1884年《改革法案》通过之后，将大都市对农村语音通道的使用权纳入国家的统一视野中”（第127页）。巴罗对“她的困境”的简短阅读（第136-137页）提供了这本书的最好例子，它说明了音符不规则，单词选择以及对现代语言学理论和对文本的过度乐观评估的可推断的抵制之间的相互关联的关系。选举改革的影响。诗歌和/或诗人的更多选择是否能够维持维多利亚时代之间的往来...