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With Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters, James Diedrick offers a groundbreaking critical biography of the German-born British poet Mathilde Blind (1841–1896), a freethinking radical feminist. Born to politically radical parents, Blind had, by the time she was thirty, become a pioneering female aesthete in a mostly male community of writers, painters, and critics, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, Ford Madox Brown, William Michael Rossetti, and Richard Garnett. By the 1880s she had become widely recognized for a body of writing that engaged contemporary issues such as the Woman Question, the forced eviction of Scottish tenant farmers in the Highland Clearances, and Darwin’s evolutionary theory. She subsequently emerged as a prominent voice and leader among New Woman writers at the end of the century, including Mona Caird, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Katharine Tynan. She also developed important associations with leading male decadent writers of the fin de siècle, most notably, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. Despite her extensive contributions to Victorian debates on aesthetics, religion, nationhood, imperialism, gender, and sexuality, however, Blind has yet to receive the prominence she deserves in studies of the period. As the first full-length biography of this trailblazing woman of letters, Mathilde Blind underscores the importance of her poetry and her critical writings (her work on Shelley, biographies of George Eliot and Madame Roland, and her translations of Strauss and Bashkirtseff) for the literature and culture of the fin de siècle.
Mathilde Blind’s contributions to the New Woman and Decadent movements in the 1880s and 1890s placed her at the centre of fin-de-siècle literary culture. She rose to prominence in the early 1870s, both as an expert on and proponent of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and as one of the few women writers published in the Dark Blue (1871–73), an influential journal that featured the work of Britain’s leading Pre-Raphaelites and aesthetes. By the late 1880s, she had established close associations with key figures of England’s emergent Decadent communities, from Vernon Lee and Rosamund Marriott Watson to Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. When her Dramas in Miniature appeared in 1891, she was fusing aestheticism and Decadence so distinctively in her poetry that Symons evoked Charles Baudelaire in calling the dramatic monologues in the volume ‘flowers of evil’. Her career thus highlights the connections between mid-Victorian aestheticism and late-century Decadence. It also serves as an important corrective to the male-focused narratives that long dominated accounts of these movements. In addition, and because Blind was born in Germany of Jewish parents and part of a community of exiled European radicals, her poetry and prose alike are characterized by a transnational, cosmopolitan outlook that ranges across national borders and consistently engages with Continental writers and ideas. This new edition for the first time brings together the three major volumes of poetry Blind published between 1889 and 1895 alongside a critical introduction and explanatory notes. Because she was also an active reviewer and essayist throughout her career, it includes a selection of her reviews as well as her essay ‘Shelley’s View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin’s’, which serves as an important supplement to her 1889 volume The Ascent of Man. The edition also features a selection of critical responses to Blind’s writing by leading late-Victorian poets and critics.
The Colbeck collection was formed over half a century ago by the Bournemouth bookseller Norman Colbeck. Focusing primarily on British essayists and poets of the nineteenth century from the Romantic Movement through the Edwardian era, the collection features nearly 500 authors and lists over 13,000 works. Entries are alphabetically arranged by author with copious notes on the condition and binding of each copy. Nine appendices provide listings of selected periodicals, series publications, anthologies, yearbooks, and topical works.
Surprisingly, glimmerings of ecofeminist theory that would emerge a century later can be detected in women’s poetry of the late Victorian period. In Reconceiving Nature, Patricia Murphy examines the work of six ecofeminist poets—Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field, Alice Meynell, Constance Naden, and L. S. Bevington—who contested the exploitation of the natural world. Challenging prevalent assumptions that nature is inferior, rightly subordinated, and deservedly manipulated, these poets instead “reconstructed” nature.
Poetical Matter examines the two-way exchange of language and methods between nineteenth-century poetry and the physical sciences. The book argues that poets such as William Wordsworth, Mathilde Blind, and Thomas Hardy identified poetry as an experimental investigation of nature’s materiality. It also explores how science writers such as Humphry Davy, Mary Somerville, and John Tyndall used poetry to formulate their theories, to bestow cultural legitimacy on the emerging disciplines of chemistry and physics, and to communicate technical knowledge to non-specialist audiences. The book’s chapters show how poets and science writers relied on a set of shared terms (“form,” “experiment,” “rhythm,” “sound,” “measure”) and how the meaning of those terms was debated and reimagined in a range of different texts. “A stimulating analysis of nineteenth-century poetry and physics. In this groundbreaking study, Tate turns to sound to tease out fascinating continuities across scientific inquiry and verse. Reflecting that ‘the processes of the universe’ were themselves ‘rhythmic,’ he shows that a wide range of poets and scientists were thinking through undulatory motion as a space where the material and the immaterial met. ‘The motion of waves,’ Tate demonstrates, was ‘the exemplary form in the physical sciences.’ Sound waves, light, energy, and poetic meter were each characterized by a ‘process of undulation,’ that could be understood as both a physical and a formal property. Drawing on work in new materialism and new formalism, Tate illuminates a nineteenth-century preoccupation with dynamic patterning that characterizes the undulatory as (in John Herschel’s words) not ‘things, but forms.’” —Anna Henchman, Associate Professor of English at Boston University, USA “This impressive study consolidates and considerably advances the field of physics and poetry studies. Moving easily and authoritatively between canonical and scientist poets, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences draws scientific thought and poetic form into telling relation, disclosing how they were understood variously across the nineteenth century as both comparable and competing ways of knowing the physical world. Clearly written and beautifully structured, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences is both scholarly and accessible, a fascinating and indispensable contribution to its field.” —Daniel Brown, Professor of English at the University of Southampton, UK “Essential reading for Victorianists. Tate’s study of nineteenth-century poetry and science reconfi gures debate by insisting on the equivalence of accounts of empirical fact and speculative theory rather than their antagonism. The undulatory rhythms of the universe and of poetry, the language of science and of verse, come into new relations. Tate brilliantly re-reads Coleridge, Tennyson, Mathilde Blind and Hardy through their explorations of matter and ontological reality. He also addresses contemporary theory from Latour to Jane Bennett.” — Isobel Armstrong, Emeritus Professor of English at Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Karl Marx's youngest daughter Eleanor (1855-98) is one of the most significant figures in the cultural politics of the late nineteenth century. As a feminist and radical socialist she never flinched from confrontation; as an aspiring actress, working journalist and literary translator she advanced contemporary understanding of Flaubert, Ibsen and Shakespeare. This collection of newly commissioned essays helps to establish the full extent of her outstanding achievements.