The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226834962)

A major new account of Victorian poetry and its place in the field of literary studies.

The Burden of Rhyme shows how the nineteenth-century search for the origin of rhyme shaped the theory and practice of poetry. For Victorians, rhyme was not (as it was for the New Critics, and as it still is for us) a mere technique or ahistorical form. Instead, it carried vivid historical fantasies derived from early studies of world literature. Naomi Levine argues that rhyme's association with the advent of literary modernity and with a repertoire of medievalist, Italophilic, and orientalist myths about love, loss, and poetic longing made it a sensitive historiographic instrument. Victorian poets used rhyme to theorize both literary history and the most elusive effects of aesthetic form. This Victorian formalism, which insisted on the significance of origins, was a precursor to and a challenge for twentieth-century methods. In uncovering the rich relationship between Victorian poetic forms and a forgotten style of literary-historical thought, The Burden of Rhyme reveals the unacknowledged influence of Victorian poetics--and its repudiation--on the development of modern literary criticism.

Author: Naomi Levine
ISBN-10: 0226834964
ISBN-13: 9780226834962
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 10/28/2024
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.07lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.75d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2025