Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: 'This is Living Art'
(Hardback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: 'This is Living Art'
By (Author) Dr Josie Billington
Continuum Publishing Corporation
Continuum Publishing Corporation
8th December 2011
United States
Classifications
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Literary studies: poetry and poets
Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900
Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800
821.8
Physical Properties
Hardback
154
Width 156mm, Height 234mm
Description
For most of the twentieth century the exuberant fluency of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's art was not regarded as worthy of serious attention. Even the evidence for the swiftness of her wit, thought and composition remains more impressionistic and anecdotal than firmly proven. Through close attention to original manuscript material, Josie Billington argues that Barrett Browning's fast, fine and excitedly vigorous and agile imaginative intelligence is Shakespearean, both in its power, and in the creative drive and dynamic to which it gives rise. Billington contends that for Barrett Browning, as for Shakespeare, writing was demonstrably a creative event not a second-order record of experience, and that Barrett Browning's characteristic habits of composition, and her creative procedure, resemble in significant ways those of the poet she valued most highly. A fascinating study of both writers' analogous creative dispositions, minds and modes.
Author Bio
Josie Billington teaches in the School of English, University of Liverpool, UK. Her publications include Faithful Realism (2002), Eliot's Middlemarch (2008) and an edition of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (2006).
