Lyric Poem and Aestheticism

Marion Thain is Professor of Culture and Technology at the University of Edinburgh and Director of Edinburgh Futures Institute. She publishes primarily on the relationship between culture and technology (understood in the broadest terms) and her current projects sit within the interdisciplinary field of attention studies. See marionthain.org for more details.

• Introduction; 1. Lyric, Aestheticism, and the Later Nineteenth century; Part I. Time; 2. Metre and Temporality: Between Hegel and Benjamin; 3. Painting, Music, Touch: D. G. Rossetti’s Ekphrasis and Competing Temporalities; 4. Parnassus and Commodity Time; Part II. Space; 5. Form and Transaction: Lyric Touch; 6. Arthur Symons and Decadent Lyric Phenomenology; 7. ‘Space, the Bound of a Solid’; Alice Meynell and Thomas Hardy; Part III. Subjectivity; 8. Desire Lines: Subjectivity and Collectivity; 9. A. C. Swinburne in the Round: Drama, Personae, and Lyric Subjectivity; 10. Ezra Pound’s Troubadour Subject: Community, Form, and ‘Lyric’ in Early Modernism; Afterword; Bibliography.

Both densely and deftly argued, The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism is a significant addition to scholarship on late-nineteenth-century poetry and will reward repeated readings not only for the history of aestheticist lyric it traces but also for the thoughtful interpretation of individual poets and poems. It will prove of special interest to students of English aestheticism, the history of the lyric, and the New Formalism.