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Literary Criticism English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Robert Browning's Language

by (author) Donald S. Hair

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Dec 1999
Category
English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Semiotics & Theory, Poetry
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802044341
    Publish Date
    Aug 1999
    List Price
    $79.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487589622
    Publish Date
    Dec 1999
    List Price
    $35.95

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Description

What are the influences that shaped the language used by one of the nineteenth century's greatest writers? How did his religious beliefs, the books he owned, the paintings and music he loved, affect almost sixty years' output of poems, plays, essays, and letters?

 

This book attempts to define Browning's understanding of the nature and use of words and syntax by considering not only a full range of texts from the 1833 Pauline to the 1889 Asolando, but also the ideas important to Browning, the historical context in which he lived, and the other artistic passions that played a part in his life.

 

In this companion volume to Tennyson's Language, Donald Hair establishes Browning's place at the crossroads between empirical and idealist traditions and explains his "double view" of language, arguing that both Locke and the Congregationalists found language to be at the same time empty and a God-given essential. The Victorian age's anti-theatrical bias, which Browning came to share, and his reading of predecessors, principally Quarles, Bunyan, Donne, and Smart, also shaped his understanding of the diction of poetry.

 

Hair conceives of Browning's language as a theoretical whole, encompassing words, genres, rhyme, syntax, and phonetics. He also links Browning's interest in music with his rhyming, the most essential and characteristic feature of his prosody, and relates his interest in painting to the interpretation of the visual image in the emblem and in typology.

About the author

Donald A. Hair is a Professor in the Department of English, University of Western Ontario, and author of Tennyson'S Language, Domestic and Heroic in Tennyson's Poetry, and Browning's Experiments with Genre.

Donald S. Hair's profile page

Awards

  • Winner, Raymond Klibansky Prize, Canadian Foundation for the Humanities & Social Sciences