valfano

Full Name
Veronica Alfano
First Name
Veronica
Last Name
Alfano
Title
Faculty Fellow
Alternate Email
veronica.alfano@gmail.com
Phone
(541) 346-1526
Office
veronica.alfano@gmail.com (active email address)
Office Hours
veronica.alfano@gmail.com (active email address)
Interests
Victorian literature, poetry and poetics, gender studies
Profile Section
Education

Ph.D. Princeton University (2011); B.A. Harvard University (2005)

Publications

The Lyric in Victorian Memory:  Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman.  Forthcoming; under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series.

Mourning Texts as Literature and Philosophy:  Still Lives (co-authored with Mark Alfano).  Forthcoming; under contract with Routledge, Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities series.

“Technologies of Forgetting:  Phonographs, Lyric Voice, and Rossetti’s Woodspurge.”  Victorian Poetry (accepted; forthcoming Summer 2017).

Edited Collection:  Virtual Victorians:  Networks, Connections, Technologies.  Co-edited with Andrew Stauffer.  Forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.

“A. E. Housman’s Ballad Economies.”  Forthcoming in Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives, ed. Kim Edwards Keates, Jane Ford, and Patricia Pulham.  London:  Routledge (Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature Series), 2015.

“Close Listening.”  Forthcoming in The Pocket Instructor:  Literature, ed. Diana Fuss and William Gleason (Princeton University Press, 2015).

“Morris and the Politics of Beauty.”  Forthcoming in William Morris: Artistry in Design and Printing​​​​, ed. Georgia Odd et al. (University College London Press, 2014).

“‘If He caught me here, / O’erheard this speech’:  Audience, Performance, and Genre in Browning’s ‘Caliban upon Setebos.’”  Victorians:  A Journal of Culture and Literature 123 (Spring 2013):  52-65.

“Remembering Christina Rossetti:  Dead Women and the Afterlife of Lyric.”  Feminist Studies in English Literature 17.2 (Winter 2009):  5-40.

“Generic Collaboration and Lyric Betrayal:  A Reading of Tennyson’s The Princess.”  Critical Matrix 18 (Fall 2009):  34-57.

“I Was Never Bard Ere:  Creation and Charity in the Wakefield Play of Noah.”  Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance 3.2 (Fall 2006):  11-20.

The Lyric in Victorian Memory

Many critics affirm that Victorian lyric is overshadowed either by the rising novel or, in studies that concentrate on Victorian verse, by the dramatic monologue.  My project, however, posits that the mnemonic nature of brief, evocative lyric poems helps to explain their persistence not only in individual memory but also in the canon.  Combining a formalist approach with historical analysis and examination of reception history, I explore lyric poetry’s links to physical and cultural remembering, as well as to Victorian writers’ thematization of memory and forgetting.  My readings focus on Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Princess (in which songs interrupt a blank-verse narrative), Christina Rossetti’s miniaturized fantasies of death and entombment, Arthur Symons’s oddly forgetful depictions of music-hall performers, and A. E. Housman’s nostalgic yet impersonal A Shropshire Lad (which cannot individuate the young men it mourns).  Considering the status of these poems as anthology favorites alongside nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical misrememberings of their authors, I argue that Victorian lyric verse – which attempts in vain to recapture lost time and to memorialize its subjects – echoes the period’s simultaneous obsession with and alienation from the past.   

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Member for

11 years 3 months