Reviewed by: Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts ed. by Daniel Tyler Sally Bushell (bio) Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts, edited by Daniel Tyler; pp. xi + 242. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, $93.00. Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts provides a useful collection of essays on the subject of poetic composition in the Victorian period. Daniel Tyler has brought together a number of key contributors, exploring the work of poets of both genders right across the period (starting with William Wordsworth and ending with W. B. Yeats) and offering readings of a range of poetic forms across various draft states. The rationale for the volume, as given in the introduction, is simple: to "assess the competing priorities that complicate and stimulate the making of poems" and to [End Page 698] make the argument that "the manuscript drafts of Victorian poems require and reward careful verbal scrutiny" (26, 27). The focus is partly authorial, partly readerly: "the study of manuscript drafts enhances a reader's appreciation of how a poem works" and gives us "an intimate glimpse of the poets in the act of creation" (2). As one would expect, the volume provides careful attention to details of draft texts on the page and detailed close readings of passages. The essays in the main body of the book are set up to explore the "competing priorities that complicate and stimulate the making of the poems" (an aspect that might perhaps have been made more focal in the introduction to give a stronger rationale for the volume) (26). These tensions involve a balance between expression and meaning (sound and sense) for poets such as Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, and Algernon Swinburne; reconstruction of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's process from fragments; the relationship between unpublished and published texts for Barrett Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough; Christina Rossetti's process of extraction; and various accounts of intertextual relationships in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Barrett Browning, and Yeats. The essay collection opens with a reading of Wordsworth's poem "On the Power of Sound" (1835) as a late example of an ongoing paradoxical state for the poet in terms of "the exploration of poetic occasion as experience of its loss" and a further tension between the moral value and the poetic/sound value of poetry itself (44). This first essay, by Peter Robinson, is well placed since it brings to the surface "a personal experience of more general disjunctions, ones that would also be faced by the poets that followed him into the heart of the Victorian century" (47). In the next two contributions, Herbert Tucker's reading of Tennyson's revisionism is itself an act of critical return and one that creates a mediated process by drawing on a printed/virtual archival collection rather than the original. Richard Cronin's chapter is centered on critical analysis of one poet by another as he looks at Barrett Browning as mediator between Robert Browning and his readership: "uncannily alert to the complex role that Browning was inviting her to play" (83). The fifth chapter stays with Barrett Browning but moves from her role as critic to that of a poet who "unmade what she had made" in the Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). Here Kirstie Blair and Marjorie Stone adopt the concept of "contexture"—comparing the structure and situation of poems in sequence in (recently discovered) unpublished and published texts motivated by strong personal feelings of grief and loss and the need to control and order these through poetry (101). In chapter 6 Tyler explores the writ-erly Clough (externalizing his process with all its hesitations and uncertainties on the page) through a tension between instinct and impulse in writing and the "ethical problem of how to act according to one's impulses without being too precipitous," which seems to look back to the Wordsworth chapter at the start (126). In chapter 7 Constance W. Hassett explores Rossetti's disciplined desire to maintain control of her writing and publication process. The final three chapters of the book turn in a slightly different direction to consider the relationship of the writer with...

Cet article est le premier de deux textes interdépendants issus d’un projet fondé par l’AHRC (R.-U.), Chronotopic Cartographies, dont le but est de cartographier les lieux et l’espace de la littérature. Il cherche à établir la valeur d’une approche topologique pour la cartographie de textes littéraires. Centré sur le concept bakhtinien de chronotope, ou relation espace-temps, qui sert de fondement à la cartographie numérique de la signification spatiale dans les œuvres littéraires, il s’ouvre sur la contextualisation de notre travail en relation au domaine de la géographie et de la cartographie littéraires. Puis il trace une distinction claire entre la cartographie du monde réel au moyen des SIG (comme cela se fait couramment en histoire ou en géographie, par exemple) et la cartographie relative au moyen de topologies, qui est essentielle selon nous à la cartographie des lieux et de l’espace fictionnels. Les modèles numériques actuels qui se rapprochent le plus de ce projet concernent l’analyse des réseaux sociaux et son adaptation à la cartographie des réseaux des personnages dans les textes littéraires. Après la contextualisation de notre travail en relation à ce projet de recherche, nous argumentons en faveur de l’utilisation des modèles topologiques en cartographie littéraire. Une variété de formes topologiques et leur signification pour la littérature sont ensuite examinées dans leurs rapports avec des exemples particuliers tirés du projet Chronotopic Cartographies.

This paper explores the concept of PlaySpace for literature as a shared spatial structure generated out of the adult-child dynamic at the heart of Children’s Fiction. It counters the negative dynamic between adult and child articulated by Rose, Lesnik-Oberstein and others, with a positive spatial dynamic for imaginative play and growth in which the child needs the adult as much as the adult needs the child. This shared space can function both positively and negatively. If PlaySpace requires the necessary frame of a protective adult for the child to be spatially secure, and thus play freely, then what happens when that figure is not present or turns out not to be what he or she appeared to be? The second half of the paper explores the concept further in relation to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, one of the earliest examples of fiction explicitly written for a child readership as a “story for boys” (Stevenson, [1894] 1925, p. 123). Treasure Island immediately problematises this psycho-spatial dynamic in and through Jim’s relationship to the island, and the reader’s relationship to Jim.

Cet article est le second de deux textes interdépendants qui présentent de nouvelles façons de cartographier la littérature au moyen d’outils numériques adaptés au XXIesiècle. Le premier article exposait la nécessité de dépasser la cartographie des textes littéraires en fonction des sites géographiques du monde réel et d’adopter, au moyen d’une topologie littéraire, une cartographie relationnelle de l’espace qui soit non référentielle. Cet article-ci cherche à trouver des débouchés pour les nouvelles méthodes de travail en sciences humaines numériques ; l’idée y est avancée que de nouvelles méthodes d’analyse et de nouveaux outils sont nécessaires. Il propose une méthode d’interprétation visuelle-verbale intégrée, qui allie la lecture attentive des significations et des structures spatiales au sein d’un texte à l’analyse de la série de cartes générée par ce même texte dans une structure itérative. Il défend par ailleurs la valeur des couches de la cartographie et de la cartographie comparative d’un même lieu de manière référentielle et non référentielle. Les œuvres littéraires choisies pour illustrer la méthode sont le Frankenstein de Mary Shelley et Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There ( De l’autre côté du miroir) de Lewis Carroll. Elles nous permettent d’explorer la validité de nos hypothèses.

This short methods paper emerges out of the AHRC-funded 'Chronotopic Cartographies' project for the digital mapping of place and space as represented in works of literature. The primary aim of that project was to find a way of mapping and visualizing represented literary worlds for which there is no corresponding real 'ground'. A solution was found in the form of topological graphs which allow for relative rather than absolute mapping (but also permit a relative imaginary map to be lain on top of a pre-existing cartesian form). Using a spatial schema to chunk out the text in terms of chronotopic (time-space) zones enables the generation of a series of visualizations that show different kinds of spatio-temporal constructions in texts. The visualizations are centred upon nodes that consist of chronotopes (e.g. 'the road') as well as locations (e.g. 'road to Geneva'); connections between them of different kinds and toporefs within them (references to other places from this one). The paper will articulate core methods from the project, outlining the stages involved in the process, from marking up the text, using a custom-made schema, through graph generation and into the implications for analysis. This will be illustrated in relation to two Victorian texts: the realist space of Dickens's Oliver Twist; and the abstract poetic space of Browning's 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'.

This short film introduces students to the concept of two generations in the Romantic period. It considers why this might be the case for this period of literature when it is not for others, proposing three reasons: the relative brevity of the period, the effect of a period of war followed by peace, the division of major male writers into these two groups. The second half of the film then focusses on the First Generation and the contemporary concept of “the Lake School”. This relates primarily to William Wordsworth and his decision to write in withdrawal from the world in the North of England. Core principles of British Romanticism are articulated by him – that poetry is of the people and in the language of the people and that it is fundamentally expressive. Wordsworth was joined in the lakes by Coleridge and Southey, allowing these poets to be called “The Lake School”. However, these principles were not universally accepted and Francis Jeffrey (editor of The Edinburgh Review) took every opportunity to attack them.

This chapter follows the principles outlined in the introduction by responding to the three early editions (1798, 1800, 1802) of Lyrical Ballads as a combined totality: three parts that make up one whole. It uses the historicity provided by the reception of the ‘Preface’ in each of the three parts to pull out defining features of response to the volume in its own time. John E. Jordan states of Lyrical Ballads, ‘For so long now we have thought of the work as a literary landmark, forgetting that many of the characteristics of that monument are the accumulation of age or the effects of perspective’.2 By looking at what the volume was assumed to be without (before) the ‘Preface,’ as well as once this prose essay is added, we can begin to understand its intended and actual impact within its own time. Approaching the volume in this way allows us to see how the work itself accumulates over time and in conjunction with its reception, as well as drawing out for us the core principles it was understood to embody.

Chapter Two contextualises the fictional map itself by aligning early examples to the history of cartography, centred on major turning points and correspondence (or non-correspondence) between real-world developments and works of literature. It begins with medieval maps as relational networks; explores the influence of Utopia as the earliest ‘literary’ map; analyses the mapping of the New World in relation to Defoe and Swift; before considering the effects of the Ordnance Survey and maps of Empire on the mapping of fictional place and space. (84)

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