The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing BlindnessThis innovative study of vision, gender and poetry traces Milton's mark on Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne to show how the lyric male poet achieves vision at the cost of symbolic blindness and feminisation. Drawing together a wide range of concerns including the use of myth, the gender of the sublime, the lyric fragment, and the relation of pain to creativity, this book is a major re-evaluation of the male poet and the making of the English poetic tradition.The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne examines the feminisation of the post-Miltonic male poet, not through cultural history, but through a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus and Sappho. It recovers a disfiguring sublime imagined as an aggressive female force which feminises the male poet in an act that simultaneously deprives and energises him. This book will be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the English poetic tradition and Victorian poetry. |
Contents
Orpheus Sappho and the feminised | 11 |
Milton and Shelley | 47 |
from Sappho to Satan | 88 |
metamorphoses | 178 |
Notes | 222 |
| 257 | |
| 273 | |
Other editions - View all
The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness Catherine Maxwell Limited preview - 2001 |
The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness Catherine Maxwell No preview available - 2009 |
Common terms and phrases
A. C. Swinburne Anactoria androgynous associated Barrett Browning beauty becomes bird blindness Browning's castration chapter classical critics dark death desire disfiguration dream Duchess Duke Elizabeth Barrett emotions English epipsyche Epipsychidion essay Eurydice eyes female sublime feminine figure fragment Freud gaze gender hermaphrodite heterosexual Ibid ideal identified identity imagination inspiration Itylus Keats language lesbian Letters literary London look lover lyric male poet mark masculine Medusa Milton mirror muse myth Narcissism nature nightingale notes Orpheus Ovid Oxford Ozymandias Paglia pain painting Paradise Lost passion Philomela Plato poem poet's poetic poetry Porphyria's Lover Princess Pygmalion readers Robert Browning Romantic Romanticism Sapphic Sappho scene seems seen sexual Shakespeare Shelley Shelley's sight song sonnet soul speaker stanza suggests Swinburne Swinburne's symbolic T. S. Eliot Tennyson Thamuris tion tradition University Press Urania veiled verse Victorian vision visionary voice woman poet women word writing
