Rhyme’s Crimes
This article shows how rhyme came to be devalued critically. It argues that formalist methodologies alone cannot explain why rhyme once dominated and then fell in importance. Nor can formalism save rhyme by pointing to the reasons why humans enjoy it or by showing how it adds to poetry’s value. Instead, in historicist fashion, I focus on how political factors have determined the meaning of rhyme in the last three hundred years. I link rhyme’s fall to a series of ideological disavowals that tied the technique to subject positions deemed unfree. From political conservatism and aristocracy to femininity, childishness, and popular vulgarity, rhyme was positioned in aesthetic discourse as a device not fit for liberal professors of poetry. The case of rhyme illustrates that literary form can never be abstracted from the political contests by which culture is riven.
Annual Bibliography for 2015
T he annual bibliography of the Keats-Shelley Journal catalogues recent scholarship related to British Romanticism, with emphasis on secondgeneration writers—particularly John Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt. The bibliography includes books, chapters in books, book reviews, articles in journals, other bibliographies, dissertations, and editions of Romantic-era literature and historical documents. The listings are compiled primarily from the catalogues of major British and American publishers and from the tables of contents of books and major journals in the field. The first section of the bibliography lists a wide range of scholarly work on Romanticism that might be of interest to the Journal’s readers, while the subsequent sections list items that deal more specifically with the six aforementioned authors. Because the length of the bibliography precludes my annotating every item, only some entries have annotations—primarily books dealing with the second-generation Romantics. The following bibliography catalogues scholarship for the year 2015, along with the occasional item that inadvertently may have been excluded from the annual bibliography in previous years or that may have arrived too late for inclusion. While I have made every attempt to keep the bibliography accurate and comprehensive, the occasional error or omission is inevitable. Please send corrections, additions, and citations for upcoming bibliographies to Ben P. Robertson at Troy University (ksjbiblio@troy.edu).
Englishness and National Culture
In this highly engaging book, Antony Easthope examines 'Englishness' as a form and a series of shared discourses. Discussing the subject of 'nation' - a growing area in literary and cultural studies - Easthope offers polemical arguments written in a lively and accessible style. Englishness and National Culture asserts a profound and unacknowledged continuity between the seventeenth century and today. It argues that contemporary journalists, historians, novelists, poets and comedians continue to speak through the voice of a long-standing empiricist tradition.