Dramatic Monologue

The dramatic monologue is traditionally associated with Victorian poets such as Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and is generally considered to have disappeared with the onset of modernism in the twentieth century. Glennis Byron unravels its history and argues that, contrary to belief, the monologue remains popular to this day. This far-reaching and neatly structured volume: * explores the origins of the monologue and presents a history of definitions of the term * considers the monologue as a form of social critique * explores issues at play in our understanding of the genre, such as subjectivity, gender and politics * traces the development of the genre through to the present day. Taking as example the increasingly politicized nature of contemporary poetry, the author clearly and succinctly presents an account of the monologue's growing popularity over the past twenty years.

First published in 1977, this book looks at the versatile literary form of dramatic monologue. Although it is often associated with Browning and other poets writing between 1830 and 1930, the concept has been employed by diverse poets of multiple periods such as Ovid, Chaucer, Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. In this study, Alan Sinfield demonstrates and analyses the range and adaptability of the form through detailed examples. He shows that the technique maintains a shifting and uncertain balance between the voices of the poet and of his created speaker; when extended, as in Maud, Amours de Voyage, The Ring and the Book, and The Wasteland, the use of dramatic monologue raises questions of personality and perception. In the second part of the text, the author discusses the origins of Victorian and Modernist dramatic monologue in the dramatic complaint and the Ovidian verse epistle of earlier periods, offering a new interpretation of the value of dramatic monologue to Browning and Tennyson. Through his writing, Alan Sinfield successfully highlights the eternal vibrance of the form.

This Companion to Victorian Poetry provides an introduction to many of the pressing issues that absorbed the attention of poets from the 1830s to the 1890s. It introduces readers to a range of topics - including historicism, patriotism, prosody, and religious belief. The thirteen specially-commissioned chapters offer insights into the works of well-known figures such as Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and the writings of women poets - like Michael Field, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster - whose contribution to Victorian culture has in more recent years been acknowledged by modern scholars. Revealing the breadth of the Victorians' experiments with poetic form, this Companion also discloses the extent to which their writings addressed the prominent intellectual and social questions of the day. The volume, which will be of interest to scholars and students alike, features a detailed chronology of the Victorian period and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

In these monologues, we meet Nathan the shepherd, Ahkmet the innkeeper, Barabbas the zealot, even Judas the betrayer, and six more, sharing eyewitness accounts of events surrounding the birth and crucifixion of Christ.

This book explores Tennyson's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation--theological, social, political, or personal--and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. Offering a new approach to reading Victorian dramatic monologues, Pearsall probes the complex aims of these performances, showing how speakers' ambitions are both articulated in, and attained through, their consequential speech.

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The hazy settings and amorphous auditors of Tennyson's dramatic monologues are often contrasted-at Tennyson's expense-with Browning's more vivid, concrete realizations. Hughes argues that Tennyson's achievements in the genre are, in fact, considerable, that his influence can be traced in such major figures as T. S. Eliot, and that the monologue occupies a far more central position in Tennyson's poetic achievement than has hitherto been acknowledged. Hughes' study challenges the traditional view of Tennyson's inferior achievement, and her account of the elements and operation of the dramatic monologue, especially as demonstrated by three of its most important practitioners, will be of interest to all those concerned with the monologue as a poetic mode.

In The Dramatic Monologue, Elisabeth A. Howe defines the characteristics of the subject as a genre, clearly differentiating it from the lyric poem. One feature she discusses is the double voice of the dramatic monologue - the reader hears simultaneously the voices of the poet and the speaker. This dialogical effect distinguishes the dramatic monologue both from lyric poetry and from narrative poems written in the first person. The use of a persona allows the poet to distance himself or herself from the poem. Howe investigates the origins of the dramatic monologue before examining poems by Browning and Tennyson, both masters of the form and both largely responsible for its popularity with late-nineteenth-century readers and poets. She offers close readings of Browning's "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church" and Tennyson's "Tithonus". Later chapters include detailed analyses of dramatic monologues by twentieth-century poets, including Ezra Pound's "Marvoil", T.S. Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady", and poems by Robert Frost, Randall Jarrell, and the contemporary poet Richard Howard.