![]() ![]() Sketches out arguments and examples treated more substantially in Slinn 2003 (cited under Performativity and Politics).Dramatic Monologue Meaning: A Dramatic Monologue is referred to as a type of poetry written in the form of a speech of an individual character. Insightful summary of aspects of the history, cultural contexts, and critical approaches to the genre. Edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. “Dramatic Monologue.” In A Companion to Victorian Poetry. 25), because the first-person perspective is fictive. Develops the idea of the “feigning” nature of the dramatic monologue, which “pretends to be something other than what it is” (p. Traces a broad history of the genre in English, with Browning as the most frequent test case. ![]() She argues that the words of speakers are efficacious, accomplishing various goals-some stated, some implicit. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.ĭrawing from a range of poets and critics, Pearsall views dramatic monologues as performative, as seeking to represent or compel various social transformations. “The Dramatic Monologue.” In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry. New York: Twayne, 1996.Ī solid overview, with a chapter that surveys the history and definitions of the genre, stressing its narrative elements, followed by chapters on the Victorians (with particular attention to Browning and Tennyson), the modernists, and 20th-century authors. Critical works in the bibliography focus on Browning, but the theoretical texts cited have a broader range. 2006.Īn abbreviated entry but a useful bibliography, adapted from Everett 1991, cited under Reader-Response. Discussions of Browning’s Dramatic Monologues: A Bibliography. Highly attentive to the gender dynamics of male and female poets and speakers, as well as cross-gendered monologues.Įverett, Glenn S. London: Routledge, 2003.Ī comprehensive guide, beginning with a review of the debates concerning definition, paying consistent attention to the Victorians but spanning historically from the genre’s Romantic origins to its modernist and contemporary developments. Pearsall 2000 and Slinn 2002 both approach dramatic monologues as kinds of speech acts, discussing a range of controversies and poems in more focused introductory essays.īyron, Glennis. Sinfield 1977 probes the theoretical implications of the fictive or “feigning” aspects of the genre, and especially what the author sees as an ironic discrepancy between the speaker and the judgment of the poet and the reader. Everett 2006 provides an online bibliography via The Victorian Web. Howe 1996 is less comprehensive but still helpful in addressing the genre’s relation to narrative. Byron 2003 provides an indispensable starting point for approaching the genre by introducing key issues concerning the genre’s definition, history, and theoretical debates. ![]() The works listed below provide helpful introductions to the genre’s primary features and the debates surrounding them. Because this bibliography concentrates on the Victorian instantiation of the genre as a whole, it is organized along literary-historical, thematic, and theoretical lines, rather than by author. The complex, even dizzying, range of interpretive options (and still other approaches are possible) may help account for the vitality of this genre in the Victorian period. An influential critical view holds that the reader feels torn between moral or ironized distance and sympathetic engagement with the poem’s speaker, a view now considered by some as overly dependent on the positing of a universalized and ahistorical “reader.” These debates in themselves point to the highly relational nature of Victorian dramatic monologues, which can call into question the nexus between the speaker and the auditor, the speaker and the reader, the auditor and the reader, and the poet and the speaker, auditor, or reader. The role of the reader has been a source of debate as well. But the status of the speech is under debate: Is what the speaker says gratuitous and unwittingly self-revealing, or is it purposeful, intentional, and self-aware? The status of the auditor is also in question, with some arguing that he or she plays a major role in the dramatic monologue, and others arguing that he or she is a negligible figure. Most would agree that, at a minimum, a dramatic monologue consists of a speaker who is indicated not to be the poet an auditor, specified or implied and a particularized situation or setting. The features that constitute a dramatic monologue are themselves under debate, as taxonomists have charted courses between definitions that are so broad as to include any number of single-speaker poems, or so narrow as to exclude well-known and widely accepted examples of the genre. ![]() Although the dramatic monologue stands as a definitive Victorian poetic form, defining the genre is a vexed issue. ![]()
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