Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature

Description

This rich and elegant work describes how the unsettled cultural climate provided fertile soil for the flourishing of elegy. John Rosenberg shows how the phenomenon of elegy pervaded the writing of the period, tracing it through the voices of individuals from Carlyle, Tennyson, Darwin and Ruskin, to Swinburne, Pater, Dickens and Hopkins. Finally, he turns from particular elegists to a common experience that touched them all - the displacement of the older idea of the earthly city as a New Jerusalem by the rise of a new image of the Victorian city as an industrial Inferno, a wasteland of sprawling towns and of rivers so polluted they caught on fire.

John D. Rosenberg is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English at Columbia University of New York. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including American Council of Learned Societies, Guggenheim and NEH fellowships. Among many works and editions, he has written 'The Darkening Glass, on Ruskin' (Columbia University Press, 1961); and 'Carlyle and the Burden of History' (Harvard University Press, 1985).

'An inventive and spirited book, with many brilliant pages which any student of Victorian culture would do well to ponder.' -Roger Ebbatson, 'The Tennyson Research Bulletin' 'John D Rosenberg devotes his principal energies to an exploration of the elegy as an instrument for the expression of personal loss.' -'Dickens Quarterly' "Elegy for An Age' is best read as a series of intense engagements with the literary past that also constitute a retrospective of a distinguished career.' -Paul Lincoln Sawyer, 'Modern Philology' 'Recommended.' -R. E. Wiehe, emeritus, University of Massachusetts at Lowell, in 'Choice'