The Sonnet and the Sequence

Rossetti's “Sonnet on the Sonnet” served not only as a gift for his mother's birthday and a reflection on a favorite poetic form. Placed at the head of The House of Life, a sonnet sequence on which Rossetti had been working for more than a dozen years, it also introduced the best known and most complete version of that work when it was published in 1881.

General Introduction

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem, "The Sonnet," is a testament to the ideals of the aesthetic movement; wedding form and content, it makes a statement about the idealizing purposes of art while illustrating the best way to achieve that purpose in the very stylistic features of a poem. The poem also betrays a number of concerns about the relation of a given aesthetic production to its reader. Is this poem a personal gift (pro Matre fecit) made for the occasion of DGR’s mother’s eightieth birthday?

In an Artist's Studio

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[A Sonnet is a Moment's Monument]

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Magazine and Book Illustrations for The Were-Wolf

Magazine and Book Illustrations for The Were-Wolf

Clemence Housman published The Were-Wolf twice in her lifetime: first as a story in a popular magazine and then as a book. Each time the novella was accompanied by a unique set of illustrations that shaped its reception. This essay examines the contrasting meanings for The Were-Wolf created by their accompanying illustrations, modes of production, and publication venues. 

"The Cry of the Children" (1843) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

This is the first omnibus scholarly edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's (then Elizabeth Barrett Barrett) protest poem "The Cry of the Children" (1843), as it was published in Blackwood's Magazine.  The editors and annotators have built on sustained scholarly engagement about the poem, its contexts, and its relationship with laboring-class poetry of the time.  This was initiated by their cooperation for "Rhyme and Reform: Victorian Working-Class Poets and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Cry of the Children.'"  This two-day, international, multi-site symposium (Oct.

A Mystery in Scarlet: Editorial Introduction

Robert Louis Stevenson, celebrated author of Treasure Island  (1882-3), Kidnapped (1886), and "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1886) was a lifelong connoisseur of "penny dreadfuls": illustrated serial fiction that targeted working-class readers. In Stevenson's childhood, his nurse Alison Cunningham often read dreadfuls to him. In adulthood, Stevenson was haunted by one serial in particular. This was A Mystery in Scarlet by “Malcolm J. Errym,” the pseudonym of James Malcolm Rymer (1814-84).