by Mary Arseneau
contributions by Antony H. Harrison and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
edited by Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
Ohio University Press, 1999
Cloth: 978-0-8214-1243-5
Library of Congress Classification PR5238.C85 1999
Dewey Decimal Classification 821.8

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK

The Culture of Christina Rossetti explores a “new” Christina Rossetti as she emerges from the scrutiny of the particular historical and cultural context in which she lived and wrote. The essays in this collection demonstrate how the recluse, saint, and renunciatory spinster of former studies was in fact an active participant in her society’s attempt to grapple with new developments in aesthetics, theology, science, economics, and politics.


The volume examines Rossetti’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives in order to reevaluate her place in the Victorian world of art, literature, and ideas. The essays offer a radical rethinking of her best-known poems, retrieve neglected works, establish the diversity of her writing, and reposition Rossetti within a canon continually under formation.


Contributing to the ongoing retrieval of the nineteenth-century woman poet, The Culture of Christina Rossetti highlights Rossetti’s responses to both male and female literary traditions and explores her incorporation and revision of literary influences from medieval Italian sources to contemporary writers.