Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare 'This is Living Art'

by Billington, Josie

• ISBN13: 9780826495983
• ISBN10: 0826495982
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-02-09
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

For most of the twentieth century the exuberant fluency of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's art was not regarded as worthy of serious attention. Even the evidence for the swiftness of her wit, thought and composition remains more impressionistic and anecdotal than firmly proven. Through close attention to original manuscript material, Josie Billington argues that Barrett Browning's fast, fine and excitedly vigorous and agile imaginative intelligence is Shakespearean, both in its power and in the creative drive and dynamic to which it gives rise. Billington contends that for Barrett Browning, as for Shakespeare, writing was demonstrably a creative event not a second-order record of experience, revealing that Barrett Browning's characteristic habits of composition, and her creative procedure, resemble in significant ways that of Shakespeare. A fascinating study of both writers' analogous creative dispositions, minds and modes.

Author Biography

Josie Billington teaches in the School of English, University of Liverpool, UK.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. viii
Introduction	p. 1
The Poet at Work	p. 12
Transitions, Blanks and In-Betweens	p. 12
Discipline and Improvisation	p. 23
The Sonnet	p. 34
Sonnets from the Portuguese	p. 54
A Drama of Becoming	p. 54
A New Tradition?	p. 62
A Place to Stand and Love In	p. 68
Aurora Leigh	p. 84
The Blank Verse Adventure	p. 85
Great Freedom within Great Order	p. 87
'This is Living Art'	p. 93
'Pauses Frequent to Brokenness'	p. 98
Aurora and Hamlet	p. 105
Aurora Leigh as a 'problem play'	p. 111
Conclusion	p. 125
Bibliography	p. 130
Index	p. 138
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