The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture contains thirty essays exploring some of the Victorian era’s greatest moral infractions, titillations, and transgressions. Published earlier this year and edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier, it contains my own chapter on a scandal “seldom, if ever, equaled for its fierceness in the annals of English literary history”: the publication of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866).
Despite the title, the contents of Swinburne’s first collection were anything but bland. On publication, its sixty-two poems were attacked as ‘nameless, shameless abominations’, the product of a ‘putrescent imagination’, and one poem in particular, ‘Dolores’, was singled out with a truly-inspired metaphor as the ‘mere deification of incontinence’.
With new material, ‘”Let us Adore Spilled Blood”: Swinburne and the Scandal of Poems and Ballads’ describes why his poetry was attacked and charts the scandal’s various twists and turns, bringing together details that until now have been scattered across many different texts. It also interprets individual poems while reading the scandal as Swinburne manipulating the press in an effort to be publicly damned, mirroring the masochist aesthetics of his poetry.
Available in all good libraries, physically or in Ebook, hopefully soon in paperback (please?), but until then click below for the abstract and for access (if you’ve got access rights, that is):
The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture
Categories: poetry
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