Clinton Machann

Offering provocative readings of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Clough's Amours de Voyage, and Browning's The Ring and the Book, Clinton Machann brings to bear the ideas and methods of literary Darwinism to shed light on the central issue of masculinity in the Victorian epic. This critical approach enables Machann to take advantage of important research in evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, among other scientific fields, and to bring the concept of human nature into his discussions of the poems. The importance of the Victorian long poem as a literary genre is reviewed in the introduction, followed by transformative close readings of the poems that engage with questions of gender, particularly representations of masculinity and the prevalence of male violence. Machann contextualizes his reading within the poets' views on social, philosophical, and religious issues, arguing that the impulses, drives, and tendencies of human nature, as well as the historical and cultural context, influenced the writing and thus must inform the interpretation of the Victorian epic.

Offering provocative readings of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Clough's Amours de Voyage, and Browning's The Ring and the Book, Clinton Machann brings to bear the ideas and methods of literary Darwinism to shed light on the central issue of masculinity in the Victorian epic. This critical approach enables Machann to take advantage of important research in evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, among other scientific fields, and to bring the concept of human nature into his discussions of the poems. The importance of the Victorian long poem as a literary genre is reviewed in the introduction, followed by transformative close readings of the poems that engage with questions of gender, particularly representations of masculinity and the prevalence of male violence. Machann contextualizes his reading within the poets' views on social, philosophical, and religious issues, arguing that the impulses, drives, and tendencies of human nature, as well as the historical and cultural context, influenced the writing and thus must inform the interpretation of the Victorian epic.

Clinton Machann challenges recent popular approaches to the Victorian autobiography that treat the genre ahistorically or as a subgenre of fiction. Machann argues instead for considering these autobiographies intertextually and as a historically defined genre that can profitably be studied as nonfiction and as a referential art. The plots of Victorian autobiographies are highly variable in terms of developing motifs and tropes. Autobiographers undergo spiritual and mental crises, live out Romantic and biblical myths, follow historical and scientific paradigms and the dynamic patterns of their own ideas. Nevertheless, underlying this diversity are profound structural similarities in plots of self-development and the implied relationships between self and public works and ideas. In the course of discussing eleven Victorian autobiographies in chronological order, Machann suggests many formal and conventional continuities among them. The eleven autobiographies include those of John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, and Charles Darwin, among other luminaries of the Victorian era. Juxtaposing well-known works with less familiar ones, Machann helps the reader to explore the boundaries of the genre, appreciate stylistic variations, and identify profound structural similarities, all of which result from the larger Victorian culture. The book will be of interest to students of the Victorian era as well as scholars of life-writing and historical constructions of the self.