'This is a brilliantly conceived book, showing how Aestheticist lyrics, despite their frequent use of antiquated forms, actively engage with the concerns of modernity. In arguing that the rhetorical strategies adopted by these poems are not proto-Modernist but rather "post-Victorian" - self-consciously playing on earlier works, in the manner of postmodernism - Thain offers truly fresh insight, not only into this particular corpus of fin de siècle literature, but into the possibilities of the lyric genre itself.' Erik Gray, Columbia University The remaking of lyric poetry in Victorian modernity As cultural and philosophical shifts were challenging the fundamental generic identity of 'lyric', aestheticist poets seemed to turn insistently to forms from the past. Yet might those antique forms be understood in relation to the pressures of modernity? How might they have been used to reimagine lyric's presence in the modern world? This book argues that aestheticist poetry (c. 1860 to 1914) responds profoundly to the crisis of lyric's relevance to a rapidly modernising age, not in spite of these forms but through them. Setting its focal poetry within broader conceptual frames, and featuring innovative analysis of both recently rediscovered and canonical works, this study asks us to reimagine the relationship between poetry and modernity. Key Features - Challenges and transforms existing narratives of the modern formation of the 'lyric' genre through engagement with a body of work that larger-scale genre histories elide - Provides three fresh theoretical frames to examine the relationship between poetry and modernity - Offers innovative analysis of a range of literary figures such as Thomas Hardy, D. G. Rossetti, Alice Meynell, Arthur Symons, A. C. Swinburne and Ezra Pound Professor Marion Thain works in Liberal Studies and English at New York University. Her previous publications include The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations (2013); and 'Michael Field' Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle (2007). Cover design: [EUP Logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-1566-8

Marion Thain is Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King's College London. Her main publications include The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism; Forms of Modernity (Edinburgh University Press: 2016), The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Michael Field, The Poet (1880-1914): Published and Manuscript Materials, ed. with Ana Vadillo (Broadview Press, 2009), Michael Field (1880-1914): Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 2007; issued in paperback in 2010) and Poetry of the 1890s, ed. with R. K. R. Thornton (Penguin, 1998).