Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Literary Criticism English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Origins of the Monologue

The Hidden God

by (author) W. David Shaw

Publisher
University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Initial publish date
Dec 1999
Category
English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802047182
    Publish Date
    Dec 1999
    List Price
    $60.00

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Out of print

This edition is not currently available in bookstores. Check your local library or search for used copies at Abebooks.

Description

At a time when ancient truths were crumbling and certainties were hard to find, poets created speakers, often persons of divided mind or conflicting sympathies, who addressed unheard auditors with their words. In talking about themselves to this imagined audience, the speakers of these dramatic monologues revealed themselves to the real audience, the poets' readers. Through the use of such ventriloquized verse, ideas could be brought forward and debated without danger. The poet, speaking the monologues through the mouths of his characters, was a hidden God, a reflection of the subversive ideals of Victorian agnostic theology.

Although focusing on the period of roughly 1830 to 1880 and on such principal creators of dramatic monologues as Robert Browning, Tennyson, and William Morris, David Shaw also examines monologues from Chaucer and Donne to T.S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell. Using the agnostic theories of God's masks as a model for the masks assumed by poets when they write dramatic monologues, Shaw shows how important changes in cultural and intellectual history can disturb and transform a major poetic genre.

About the author

W. David Shaw is a professor emeritus in the Department of English at Victoria College, University of Toronto.

W. David Shaw's profile page