(DOWNLOAD) "Clough, Bankruptcy, And Disbelief: The Economic Background to "Blank Misgivings" (Arthur Hugh Clough) (Essay) (Victorian Poetry) (Critical Essay)" by Victorian Poetry ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

eBook details

Title: Clough, Bankruptcy, And Disbelief: The Economic Background to "Blank Misgivings" (Arthur Hugh Clough) (Essay) (Victorian Poetry) (Critical Essay)
Author : Victorian Poetry
Release Date : January 22, 2006
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 244 KB

Description

Perhaps belatedly in contrast to criticism of Victorian fiction, over the past fifteen years or so several major commentators have directed attention to the relation between Victorian poetry and Victorian commerce. Alan Sinfield's rereading of Tennyson, Isobel Armstrong's analogies between money and language, and Lee Erickson's treatment of the early Victorian poetic marketplace, are all indications that Victorianists are beginning to give the same kind of post-Marxist economic scrutiny to poetic production that they have long given to the novel. (1) Arthur Hugh Clough is one of the few canonical or quasi-canonical Victorian poets to have read, thought, and written at all extensively about Victorian economics, but the origin and nature of Clough's engagement have not, I think, been fully explored. (2) This essay draws on hitherto-unused evidence about Clough's father's career in the highly competitive transatlantic cotton-trade of the 1820s and 1830s. Through this new information it is now possible to re-read the impact of his father's career, not only on Clough's economic writings, and on his social satires, but on other Clough poems from the early forties. Clough's early religious verse has often seemed conventional and abstract, because critics have not recognized the direct, often startlingly concrete, experiential genesis of its economic imagery. The subtext of Clough's early religious poetry was not just the sense of moral indebtedness or moral discredit, but a quite literal bankruptcy.