1st Edition

Arthur O'Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum

By Jordan Kistler Copyright 2016
200 Pages
by Routledge

210 Pages
by Routledge

210 Pages
by Routledge

Arthur O'Shaughnessy's career as a natural historian in the British Museum, and his consequent preoccupation with the role of work in his life, provides the context with which to reexamine his contributions to Victorian poetry. O'Shaughnessy's engagement with aestheticism, socialism, and Darwinian theory can be traced to his career as a Junior Assistant at the British Museum, and his perception of... Read more

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1 'Dreary Creeds' and 'Sham Wits': O'Shaughnessy's Poetic Representations of Nature and Science

2 'I Carve the Marble of Pure Thought': Work and Art in the Poetry of Arthur O'Shaughnessy

3 'The Purest Parian': The Formalism of Arthur O'Shaughnessy

4 'Those too sanguine singers': Arthur O'Shaughnessy's French Influences

5 'Love's Splendid Lures': Arthur O'Shaughnessy's Medievalism

Conclusion

Bibliography
Index

Biography

Jordan Kistler is a Teaching Fellow in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her work focuses on the often-overlooked Pre-Raphaelite poets of the 1870s.

"Unjustly neglected for over a century, Arthur O’Shaughnessy is an unusual Pre-Raphaelite poet whose unromantic day job as a taxonomist set him apart from his literary peers. However, as Kistler shows, his writings shed important light on the works of better-known contemporaries such as Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. Kistler reclaims and contextualizes his works for a twenty-first-century readership, demonstrating that O’Shaughnessy is a Victorian poet with something significant to say about his own period and modernity. Her book constitutes a valuable contribution to the study of Victorian poetry and extends our knowledge not only of O’Shaughnessy, but of the broader context that gave rise to the Arts and Crafts movement, Aestheticism and Decadence."

- Patricia Pulham, University of Portsmouth, UK

"Kistler does a great job of showing not only that O’Shaughnessy’s poetry is worth further exploration (and appreciation), but also why O’Shaughnessy is significant..."

- Helena Ifill, University of Sheffield in The British Society for Literature and Science