Love Among the Poets: The Victorian Poetics of Intimacy

Proposed volume of essays, edited by
Pearl Chaozon Bauer (Notre Dame de Namur University)
Erik Gray (Columbia University)

“Victorian poetry,” as Isobel Armstrong observes, “is unparalleled in its preoccupation with…what it is to love.” For this collection, we are seeking essays that explore the connection between poetry—especially lyric poetry—and the experience of love or intimacy. Some questions that contributors might address (though we welcome all approaches and ideas): How is intimacy represented, or created, by the forms, rhythms, and genres of Victorian poetry? What resources does poetry offer for expressing forms of love that fall outside the traditional marriage plot of the Victorian novel? How did love poetry circulate in the Victorian era? How does it relate to other forms of Victorian art and culture? We are looking for essays that consider a wide variety of intimate relationships: not just sexual or erotic love, but friendship, divine love, marriage, and family love, among others.

Please submit a 500-word abstract no later than August 1, 2020. If you already have a version of your argument drafted—a conference paper, for example, or a dissertation chapter—you are warmly encouraged to submit that together with the abstract. We are in contact with a university press; our aim is to submit a proposal for the collection in the fall of 2020.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the editors:
Pearl Chaozon Bauer (pchaozonbauer@ndnu.edu)
Erik Gray (e.gray@columbia.edu)