Explores the use made by poets and novelists of street songs and cries with a particular focus on nineteenth and early twentieth century writers including William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, George Gissing, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust.

• Preface


• 1: Orpheus in the City


• 2: The Child in the Street


• 3: Lippi Sings the Blues


• 4: The One-Legged Sailor and Other Heroes


• 5: The Voice of an Ancient Spring


• 6: Voulez ouyr les cris de Paris?


• 7: The Poet and the Knife-Grinder

Daniel Karlin is Winterstoke Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol. He has previously held appointments at the University of Sheffield, at Boston University, and at University College London. His research spans poetry and fiction of the long nineteenth century; he has particular interests in the poetry of Robert Browning, in the writings of Walt Whitman, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Marcel Proust, and in the relations between poetry and song. His most recent book is The Figure of the Singer (Oxford University Press, 2013).