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Isobel Armstrong, FBA (born 1937) is a British academic. She is professor emerita of English at Birkbeck, University of London and a senior research fellow of the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. She is a fellow of the British Academy. [1] She has been a visiting scholar at many institutions, including at Princeton University in 2016-2017. [2] She is also a published poet. Armstrong is the younger sister of writer Diana Wynne Jones. [3]
Armstrong is a critic of nineteenth-century poetry, literature and women's writing. Her publications include Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2017), The Radical Aesthetic (2000), Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre (1999) and Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Politics and Poetics (1993). Her book Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination (2008) won the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize. [4]
In Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Politics and Poetics, Armstrong contends that poems by women can speak double, using conventionally feminine modes as a “way of looking at conformity from within.” [5] Armstrong uses Adelaide Procter as an exemplar, naming her as someone who “typifies the woman poet's interests at the time.” [5] In her poetry in the English Woman’s Journal as well as in Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words, Procter deploys “often simple, often pious, often conventional” modes of address. However, “those conventions are subjected to investigation, questioned, or used for unexpected purposes.” [5]
Possession: A Romance , the 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel by A. S. Byatt, was dedicated to Armstrong. [6]
A villanelle, also known as villanesque, is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form. The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the initial subject of the form being the pastoral.
Diana Wynne Jones was an English novelist, poet, academic, literary critic, and short story writer. She principally wrote fantasy and speculative fiction novels for children and young adults. Although usually described as fantasy, some of her work also incorporates science fiction themes and elements of realism. Jones' work often explores themes of time travel and parallel or multiple universes. Some of her better-known works are the Chrestomanci series, the Dalemark series, the three Moving Castle novels, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
Anne Sexton was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Her poetry details her long battle with depression, suicidal tendencies, and intimate details from her private life, including relationships with her husband and children, whom it was later alleged she physically and sexually assaulted.
Modernist poetry in English started in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction. In many respects, their criticism echoes what William Wordsworth wrote in Preface to Lyrical Ballads to instigate the Romantic movement in British poetry over a century earlier, criticising the gauche and pompous school which then pervaded, and seeking to bring poetry to the layman.
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former marriage name as A. S. Byatt, is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner, and won the 2017 Park Kyong-ni Prize. In 2008, The Times named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Susan Howe is an American poet, scholar, essayist and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre. Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, also known as Bea Kristol, was an American historian. She was a leader of conservative interpretations of history and historiography. She wrote extensively on intellectual history, with a focus on Great Britain and the Victorian era, as well as on contemporary society and culture.
Mathilde Blind, was a German-born English poet, fiction writer, biographer, essayist and critic. In the early 1870s she emerged as a pioneering female aesthete in a mostly male community of artists and writers. By the late 1880s she had become prominent among New Woman writers such as Vernon Lee, Amy Levy, Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Katharine Tynan. She was praised by Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, Amy Levy, Edith Nesbit, Arthur Symons and Arnold Bennett. Her much-discussed poem The Ascent of Man presents a distinctly feminist response to the Darwinian theory of evolution.
Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. She is a literary scholar and theorist who has written on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture as well as on contemporary debates in literary and cultural theory.
Carol Tecla Christ is an American academic administrator. In March 2017, she was named the 11th Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, the first woman to hold that position. She succeeded outgoing Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks on July 1, 2017.
Helen Hennessy Vendler is an American literary critic and is Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University.
Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born poetry scholar and critic in the United States.
Sally Ann Shuttleworth is a British academic specialising in Victorian literature. She is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. From 2006 to 2011, she was Head of the Humanities Division, University of Oxford. From 2014 to 2019 she was a principal investigator on the Diseases of Modern Life project, a multidisciplinary research initiative exploring nineteenth century scientific and cultural ideas related to stress and information overload.
Adelaide Anne Procter was an English poet and philanthropist.
Dennis Denisoff is a Canadian author, poet and scholar, and the Endowed McFarlin Chair of Literature and Film in the English Department at the University of Tulsa. Denisoff was an early member of The Kootenay School of Writing.
Barbara Gladys Hardy, was a British literary scholar, author, and poet. As an academic, she specialised in the literature of the 19th Century. From 1965 to 1970, she was Professor of English at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Then, from 1970 to 1989, she was Professor of English Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London.
The James Russell Lowell Prize is an annual prize given to an outstanding scholarly book by the Modern Language Association.
Yopie Prins is Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Her research includes classical reception, comparative literature, historical poetics, lyric theory, translation studies, Nineteenth-Century poetry, English Hellenism, and Victorian poetry.
Virginia Walker Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is one of the founders of historical poetics and of the new lyric studies, and is credited with "energiz[ing] criticism" about Emily Dickinson in the twenty-first century. Her research includes nineteenth-century American poetry, the history of American poetry, comparative literature, lyric theory, the history of criticism, the history of poetics, and genre theory.
Caroline Levine is an American literary critic. She is the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University. Her published works are in the fields of Victorian literature, literary theory, literary criticism, formalism, television, and climate change.
I only knew one person in the world who really thought Victorian poetry was great poetry and that was Isobel Armstrong ... The book’s dedicated to her.
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