Poets among the nations: Continental travel and the long Victorian poem.

摘要

In this dissertation, I argue that a diverse group of Victorian poets adapted the popular Romantic form of the Grand Tour travelogue into a rich variety of long verse that attempted to articulate a collective European cultural and political identity. Each poet sought ways of crossing borders that, on an individual level, went beyond travel as simple self-affirmation, and, on a political level, beyond nationalism and hegemony.;Chapter 1 focuses on Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage (1858) and Dipsychus (1865). In the midst of Murray's Byron-quoting guidebooks and the political upheavals of the Risorgimento, Clough portrays travel as a necessary exercise in destabilizing one's own cultural and political attachments. My second chapter analyzes the influence of women's prose travel narratives on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Aurora Leigh (1857). In each poem, Barrett Browning adopts a politically engaged, transnational identity that empowers her to cross gendered spheres much as she crosses national boundaries.;My third chapter explores how Robert Browning's long poems set in Italy and France responded to the Victorian demand for a high-culture form of travel literature that would compete with mass-market guidebooks. Recognizing early in his career that continental travel could enhance a poem's marketability, Browning invited readers to follow him to sites of cultural significance that an earlier generation of Grand Tourists had neglected. The poems featured in this chapter include Sordello (1840), The Ring and the Book (1868--69), Fifine at the Fair (1872), and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873).;I conclude my dissertation with an analysis of Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts (1904--08). The poem rethinks the perspective of the nation-centered novel The Trumpet-Major (1880) as well as of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812--18) and Casa Guidi Windows, poems that celebrate the causes of emerging European nations. In Hardy's poem, the blindly destructive "Immanent Will" manifests itself in the form of militaristic nationalism.