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Born in London, England, Eugene Jacob Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907) carved out a life for himself as a poet after a severe, stress-induced paralysis signaled the end of his career as a diplomat in 1873 at the age of twenty-eight. He was educated in early life in France and Germany, subsequently attending but failing to graduate from Oxford and then working for the Foreign Office. Correspondence between Lee-Hamilton and his mother, beginning when he entered Oxford in 1864 and continuing when his diplomatic career began in 1869, forecasts his neurological collapse, which was later diagnosed as a self-induced reaction to stress. His recovery twenty years later was due in large part to his recognition that he might “will” himself to recover. During his extended state of paralysis, Lee-Hamilton lived in Florence with his mother and his half-sister, Violet Paget, the writer known as Vernon Lee. Lee-Hamilton was so ill that his mother and sister had to transcribe the poetry he dictated. Although he published seven books of poetry, which included lyric and dramatic poems, during his illness, he became known mainly for his Petrarchan sonnets. The New Medusa and Apollo and Marsyas, published in 1882 and 1884, respectively, successfully draw on his extensive knowledge of history and art, but he is best known for his seventh book of poetry, the autobiographical Sonnets of the Wingless Hours, the collection that depicts his illness and his recovery. By the time the volume was published in 1894, he had emerged from his neurasthenic paralysis after treatment by an eminent German neurologist, and he went on to travel in the United States and Canada. In 1898 he married the novelist and editor Annie Holdsworth and fathered a daughter who lived only two years and whose death inspired the sonnet sequence Mimma Bella. Although Lee-Hamilton and his wife published poetry and fiction together and he began a translation of Dante’s Inferno, his work was not received as well as it had been before his recovery from neurasthenia, and those who knew him accepted that once the link between his illness and his poetic talents no longer existed, the talents themselves seem to have waned. After a series of health catastrophes brought on in part by his daughter’s death, he died in Italy in 1907. His widow published Mimma Bella in 1908.

Perhaps no other nineteenth-century poet is so firmly and inexorably associated with a specific poetic genre as is Robert Browning with the dramatic monologue. Readers have long appreciated his fascination with and ability to reveal human perversity and malevolence, as he explores not only the psychological make-up of malcontents, but also, as Daniel Karlin writes, "the animating quality of hatred." (1) These characteristics are particularly striking in religious figures that intrigue readers with their unseemly materialism and worldliness. Some obvious examples of such figures are Browning's two bishops--the greedy, sensual, and brutal bishop on his deathbed at St. Praxed's and the satirical model of casuistry, Blougram. As a master of the dramatic monologue, Browning's influence on his contemporaries and his posthumous shaping of twentieth-century dramatic poetry are of interest to scholars. However, of interest as well are the ways in which Browning's development as a dramatic poet follows a trajectory that takes a sharp turn in his long poem The Ring and the Book and the intriguing fact that this altered poetic style is similar to that of a significant dramatic poet of his time, Augusta Webster. As the younger dramatic poet, Webster admired and emulated Browning, conveying her respect for him in the titles of her two volumes of dramatic poetry: her 1866 Dramatic Studies hints at a conceptual similarity to Browning's 1864 Dramatis Personae, and her later volume, Portraits, is modeled in thematic ways on Browning's earlier Men and Women. In a long, erudite two-part review of his translation of Aeschylus for the Examiner a decade later, she articulates her allegiance to Browning, who had lost some favor with "the British public" he addresses in The Ring and the Book. (2) Beginning with Dramatic Studies, which was published two years before The Ring and the Book, Webster wrote monodrama rather than dramatic monologue, and it is this specifically performative dramatic feature that is an important element of Browning's long poem. (3) Arguably, The Ring and the Book, with which Browning was preoccupied from 1862 until its publication in 1868, marks a transitional period in both his literary and his personal lives: he wrote it during his adjustment to life in England after his long sojourn in Italy, the time in which he was also adjusting to life without Elizabeth Barrett. Browning's experiment with dramatic forms in his epic poem is an important feature of this transition that has not yet been studied; significantly, in two sections central to his conception of The Ring and the Book, the speeches of Pompilia and the Pope, he positions reader and speaker according to the same principles of monodrama with which Webster was adept. (4) While we do not know whether Browning and Webster consulted on poetic production, and we do know that he kept the manuscript of his long poem primarily to himself, he began to work on the poem in earnest after the publication of Dramatis Personae, and he was still polishing the poem after the publication of Webster's first volume of dramatic poetry. (5) Webster's Jeanne d'Arc, Sister Annunciata, the Painter, and the Preacher each provides a fruitful lens through which we might consider Browning's transition from the type of dramatic monologue that typifies both Men and Women and Dramatis Personae to the dramatic forms that shape the speeches of the Pope and Pompilia in The Ring and the Book. In this article, I focus on the ways in which Webster's Preacher and Jeanne d'Arc might serve to illuminate the nuances of Browning's ongoing development as a dramatic poet. Historically, the trajectory of Browning's poetic development has been connected to the embarrassing deluge of criticism of his early poetry and dramas. Recently, Britta Martens has challenged that assumption, and, working with poems that she identifies as Browning speaking in his own voice, she situates Browning's work in general in his sustained Romanticist poetics. …

Late nineteenth-century women poets retrace established patterns of representation of the pregnant woman, no longer emphasizing the fragility of the child and the dangers associated with childbirth. Rather, they present an empowering vindication of womanhood in the act of expelling new life from the depths of woman's body—precisely where post-coital conception and development take place. The “maternal”, then, as an aestheticist term, includes not only gestation, delivery of the child and mothering, but also the sexual act and physiological process of conception. This expansive and connotative sense of the maternal is increasingly evident in nineteenth-century poetry that redefines aesthetic “beauty” and resituates the parameters of the ideal during the course of the century, thereby contributing to the discourse of aestheticism concerned with the socio-political and cultural implications of the pregnant woman as a symbol of human continuity. Therefore, it is not surprising that in depicting the maternal a...

DURING THE LAST DECADE SCHOLARS HAVE SHOWN INTEREST IN NINETEENTH-century women who wrote in the dramatic form "masculinized" by such poets as Browning and Tennyson. (1) In her own day, Augusta Webster was compared favorably to Robert Browning, and she herself pays tribute to Browning in "A Transcript and a Transcription," a review for The Examiner of Browning's "The Agamemnon of Aeschylus," a review later collected in A Housewife's Opinions. However, Webster published in every genre, actually producing proportionately little in the way of dramatic monologue. In fact, in the last twenty-four years of her life, the prolific Augusta Webster published no dramatic poetry at all; consequently, we cannot assume that she defined herself as a writer of dramatic poetry. We need to take a more comprehensive look at a woman who promises to figure prominently in contemporary Victorian studies. Gaining insight into just how Augusta Webster did define herself as a writer has been complicated, I think, by her high profile socio-political life and by her feminist interests. Indeed, because Webster worked for the London branch of the National Committee for Women's Suffrage in the 1870s and served on the London School Board in the 1880s, we have naturally been interested in literary work that seems to us to reflect her feminist concerns. However, Webster had another profession from 1884 until her untimely death from cancer in 1894: she worked for the Athenaeum, primarily as a poetry reviewer. In this position she was able to articulate a fair[y complex system of poetics based on a balance of technical ability, innovation, and self-discipline. Significantly, this system pertains mainly to lyric rather than to dramatic poetry. In keeping with convention, her contributions to the Athenaeum were anonymous, but the marked editor's file, housed at City University London, provides an important context for a discussion of Webster's work. (2) These "review essays" are frequently comprehensive enough to allow Webster to situate poetic composition within a fairly extensive theoretical context. In 1881, three years before she joined the Athenaeum, Webster published A Book of Rhyme, included in which is a sequence of metrically ordered, inter-rhyming poems that she originally called English Stornelli, and later, in the 1893 reprint, English Rispetti. In 1881 as well, Webster wrote the earliest dated fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet in her unfinished sonnet sequence that was published posthumously in 1895 as Mother and Daughter. Therefore, throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, Webster's poetic leanings were decidedly lyric, and the few dated sonnets suggest a continuity between the rispetti, the sonnets, and the critical reviews in the Athenaeum. I intend in this paper to study the English Rispetti, a controlled form with conventions of its own, within the context of some of the poetics Webster articulates so eloquently in the Athenaeum. While Webster's principles of poetic construction obviously evolved during her years as poetry critic, the pre-Athenaeum rispetti seem to apply all the important theoretical points relating to the balance of creative innovation and conformity to convention that she uses to measure excellence in the Athenaeum. Hence, Webster theorizes in her Athenaeum reviews the precision in language and attention to form that she demonstrates in the rispetti. In substance, as well as in language and form, the Rispetti mark an important phase in Webster's creative life, for the sequence is an ironic presentation of the complexity of human existence in its temporal and temporary state. One might argue that the human preoccupation with the brevity of life and the inexorable march of time has been a sustained preoccupation in literature, but the Victorian sense of time, drastically transformed into an understanding of the implications of deep time by the publications of Darwin and his predecessors, finds its way into a great deal of nineteenth-century literature) Webster's presentation of human life and human love, as much as her facility with the dramatic, connects her to Browning, for the rispetti underscore the irony of a human existence that is limited and finite even as they celebrate the power and mutability of human love. …

By the 1870s, when Augusta Webster had published two volumes of dramatic poetry, Robert Browning had developed the dramatic monologue to a standard against which dramatic poetry was mea sured. Recent scholars of the dramatic monologue have continued the tradition of defining the genre exclusively through reference to male poets, primarily Browning.1 However, I think that we need to reconsider this association of the objective "mask" of dramatic poetry with the masculine, for the fact is that Victorian women wrote a great deal of dramatic poetry. Herein lies a dilemma: the dramatic monologue has consistently been associated with masculine reticence, particularly with an anti-Romantic, reactionary reticence on the part of Victorian male poets to express the inner self and project outward those passions that define the poetic self. Brownings public with drawal of his private poetic voice and his decision to distance himself emotionally from his subject are well known. The general contrast to dramatic poetry is emotive, expressive, and subjective lyric poetry, a poetic genre which implies a close relationship between speaker and poet. The problem we face now is that, although it cannot be called "lyric," dramatic poetry by women tends to be less specific in defining the speaker, thereby retaining an important attribute of lyric poetry and delineating a rather transparent dramatic "mask." Dora Greenwell's "Christina," Amy Levy's "Magdalen," and most of Webster's Portraits and Dramatic Studies, for example, are all works that have been labelled dramatic monologues; however, in each of these works the speaker is vaguely, at times, abstractly, drawn. These speakers are all far more broadly representative types than are

Born in 1837, Webster was a prolific writer in every genre, a self-educated classical scholar, a professional poetry reviewer, an activist, and an educator. She began her literary career as a young girl and had published two volumes of poetry, two well-received translations of Aeschylus and Euripides, and a three-volume novel by the time she became a very active member of the London Suffrage Society in the 1860s. During the 1870s Webster continued to support suffrage for women and the women’s movement in general, as well as liberalism and individualism, in a series of essays that she wrote for the Examiner and later published as A Housewife’s Opinions. Beginning in 1879, she served two terms on the London School Board, with the second term concurrent with her position as one of the main poetry reviewers for the Athenaeum. She consistently published poetry and drama in these years, as well as a children’s novella. Webster was married and had one daughter. In the 1880s she hosted literary salons and was one of the most respected literary, political, and social figures in London until she died of cancer in 1894. Webster disappeared from view immediately after her death, but critics are now seriously exploring the rich diversity of her work. The recent increased interest in Julia Augusta Webster bodes well for a more complete understanding of the significance of Webster’s work as a writer and professional critic, as well as her effectiveness as an activist and political figure.

The four Berenger plays together present a central irony in the Berenger character- he enthusiastically imagines greatness for the human race while he is ironically skeptical that humanity, with all its finite limitations, can ever experience greatness to any degree. Sometimes Berenger's hopes take the form of social aesthetics, sometimes ideological and political reforms; sometimes he expresses faith in the transcendent powers of human love, sometimes in the ultimate spiritual worth of the human soul. Berenger endorses human potential, but this endorsement is always undermined by a subtle but pervasive undermining of potential, for although we do not see Berenger fail, we do not see him succeed either. We respond, thus, to the paradox which arises out of the ambiguity of success and failure, a paradox that demonstrates quite well the combination of Romanticism and irony which specifies Romantic or philosophical irony.

In the following cluster of papers, each author discusses her experience using technology in the "classroom". All three papers are primarily concerned with pedagogy \u2013 how classes changed when computers became an integral part of the course. All raise issues related to how computers change classroom dynamics and, most importantly, how the use of computers changes the structures of authority which exist in the traditional classroom.