1st Edition

The Persistence of Beauty Victorians to Moderns

Edited By Michael O’Neill, Mark Sandy, Sarah Wootton Copyright 2015

    This significant collection of essays examines the cultural, literary, philosophical and historical representation of beauty in British, Irish and American literature. Contributors use the works of Charles Dickens, T S Eliot, W H Auden and Stephen Spender among others to explore the role of beauty and its wider implications in art and society.

    Introduction; Chapter 1 Female Beauty and Portraits of Self-Effacement in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Sarah Wootton; Chapter 2 Dickens and the Line of Beauty, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst; Chapter 3 'Ugly Meanings in Beautiful Things': Reading the First Wilde Trial, Simon J. James; Chapter 4 The Beauties of T. S. Eliot, Seamus Perry; Chapter 5 'The Enigmatical Beauty of Each Beautiful Enigma': The Persistence of Beauty and Death in the Poetics of Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, Mark Sandy; Chapter 6 W. H. Auden: The Loveliness that is the Case, Tony Sharpe; Chapter 7 Something in the Works: Frost, Bishop and the Idea of Beauty, Angela Leighton; Chapter 8 The Difficulty of Beauty: Hopkins, Yeats, Hart Crane, Spender, Michael O'Neill; Chapter 9 'Beauty in Trouble': Robert Graves and Louis Macneice, Fran Brearton; Chapter 10 Beauty is Death, Timothy Morton;

    Biography

    Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at Durham University, UK. His books include The Human Mind’s Imaginings:  Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (1989) and, as co-editor, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013), as well as three volumes of poetry, the last of which was Gangs of Shadow (2014).

    Mark Sandy is Reader in English Studies at Durham University, UK. He is author of Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (2013) and Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley: Nietzschean Subjectivity and Genre (2005).

    Sarah Wootton is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Durham University, UK. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and the visual arts, and is the author of Consuming Keats: Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature (2006) and Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation (2016).