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This video offers some quick questions/points that might be considered when writing about Christina Rossetti's "In an Artist's Studio." / https://dc.etsu.edu/lit-outlines-complete-oer/1004/thumbnail.jpg

Throughout her life Christina Rossetti was pursued by the thought of death. Many of her poems, especially her later poems, display her concerns about death. Her early poems show death as the destroyer of mortal things, reflecting her pessimism and her sometimes naturalistic views on life. Her death wish is sometimes associated with her thwarted desire for absolute love in the world. Her religious poems describe death as the gate to heaven or to hell, the final resting place from the pains of her life. Either as her religious yearning for a better place of Resurrection or as her way of expressing her unfulfilled desire in the world, her persistent theme of death is an expression of the conflict between a sometimes skeptical, sometimes religious view.

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In 1904, Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor published six songs from the oeuvre of white British poet Christina Georgina Rossetti, only a few months after reading W.E.B. Du Bois’ groundbreaking work The Souls of Black Folk (1903). This seminal book included a chapter called “Sorrow Songs” devoted to discussing slave songs. It also introduced the concept of double-consciousness to describe how Black people, see themselves through the lens of the white society. This point of view creates a sense of doubleness in their identity and recognition of self. The songs that Coleridge-Taylor composed, which he titled Six Sorrow Songs, Op. 57, address themes of love, death, and spirituality. Coleridge-Taylor grouped these art songs under the title “Sorrow Songs”—showing a connection to Du Bois’ work and its influence. This fusion of art song and slave song opens up room for examinations of cross-genre relations, which highlights complexity of meaning and textual changes when interpreted and performed—revealing a “doubledness” to the composition in this time in the composer’s life. Serge Lacasse’s (2018) model for intertextuality offers a framework for considering the cross-genre relations that emerge in this song cycle. The concepts of architextuality, transfictionality, and polytextuality from his model are particularly relevant in this cycle, as they account for inter-genre relationships, fictional elements of the story (including speakers and the setting), as well as the overall compilation of the songs, respectively. Drawing this model together with scholarship on Sorrow Songs, this thesis focuses on the emergence of “Sorrow Songs” at this pivotal moment in the composer’s life, which will enable the consideration of the intertext of Western classical and African slave songs in this composition as well as the creation of a story in this musico-literary hybrid. Context is critical to this discussion so his trips to the USA, personal experiences, the socio-political events of the time, and the encounter with the influential Black figures will be discussed to understand how this song cycle reshaped Coleridge-Taylor’s musical path. Intertextual analysis of this song cycle reveals a sense of double meaning in Six Sorrow Songs, Op. 57, where one clearly sees Du Bois’ concept at work in the life of the composer living as a Black man in a white society, in his music combining Western classical and Sorrow Song genres, in the medium he chose to write for, a singer and a pianist, and in setting spiritual/religious poetry written by a white poet to these romantic songs.

Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti both suffered from ambivalent feelings concerning the role female sexuality plays in the salvation of the soul. These ambivalent feelings ranged from seeing female sexuality as leading men to salvation, to seeing it as a trap for the destruction of women's souls as well as men's. The contradictory feelings of the Rossettis' typifies the Victorian people's experience and was caused by the nature of the times. Using the analysis of the period by Walter E. Houghton in The Victorian Frame of Mind: 1830-1870, this paper describes the affect the Victorians' religious zeal, their "moral earnestness," and their "woman-worship" had on the two Rossetti poets.

The writing style of a number of authors writing in English was empirically investigated for the purpose of detecting stylistic patterns in relation to advancing age. The aim was to identify the type of stylistic markers among lexical, syntactical, phonemic, entropic, character-based, and content ones that would be most able to discriminate between early, middle, and late works of the selected authors, and the best classification or prediction algorithm most suited for this task. Two pilot studies were initially conducted. The first one concentrated on Christina Georgina Rossetti and Edgar Allan Poe from whom personal letters and poetry were selected as the genres of study, along with a limited selection of variables. Results suggested that authors and genre vary inconsistently. The second pilot study was based on Shakespeare's plays using a wider selection of variables to assess their discriminating power in relation to a past study. It was observed that the selected variables were of satisfactory predictive power, hence judged suitable for the task. Subsequently, four experiments were conducted using the variables tested in the second pilot study and personal correspondence and poetry from two additional authors, Edna St Vincent Millay and William Butler Yeats. Stepwise multiple linear regression and regression trees were selected to deal with the first two prediction experiments, and ordinal logistic regression and artificial neural networks for two classification experiments. The first experiment revealed inconsistency in accuracy of prediction and total number of variables in the final models affected by differences in authorship and genre. The second experiment revealed inconsistencies for the same factors in terms of accuracy only. The third experiment showed total number of variables in the model and error in the final model to be affected in various degrees by authorship, genre, different variable types and order in which the variables had been calculated. The last experiment had all measurements affected by the four factors. Examination of whether differences in method within each task play an important part revealed significant influences of method, authorship, and genre for the prediction problems, whereas all factors including method and various interactions dominated in the classification problems. Given the current data and methods used, as well as the results obtained, generalizable conclusions for the wider author population have been avoided.

The period spanning from the late 1850s to the mid-1860s frames a historical moment in Victorian England when lactation and breastfeeding came under intense public scrutiny in both medical and creative writing. While popular domestic author Isabella Beeton wrote on the dangers that an unwary mother’s milk represented for her child and herself in her serial publication, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1859-1861), prominent physicians C.H.F. Routh and William Acton launched a public dispute in medical journals contesting the physiological and moral dangers that the fallen wet nurse posed for the middle-class household (1859). Meanwhile, the medical community catalogued the bizarre long-term physical and dispositional side-effects of an infant’s consumption of “bad milk” – among them, syphilis, swearing, sexual immorality, and death (Matus 161-162). But it is not only medical writers who were latching on to the breastfeeding debate as a means of voicing social and political concerns of the day; recent literary critics have gestured towards the troubling manifestations of lactation in popular mid-century novels like Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) as entry points into Victorian anxieties about classed and gendered embodiment. This project stipulates that the mid-century preoccupation with managing women’s milk represents an intersection of two overlapping cultural paradigms pertaining to female expression: a cultural devaluation of female physiological expression as unconscious if not dangerous leakage, and a deprecation of female linguistic and poetic expression as an analogously unmeditated and potentially disruptive kind of communication. Mid-century manuals, articles, and novels offered public voice to a number of existing anxieties surrounding breastfeeding which accompanied the mid-nineteenth century, a historical moment at the cusp of a waning popularity in wet nursing and at the advent and rise of patented infant formula. This project stipulates that at least three female poets of the mid-nineteenth century employ lactation imagery in their works as a means of recasting a cultural devaluation of female expression – inventing a new critical terminology of feminine poetic signifiers that uses the symbolic medium of breastmilk as its ink. Informed by the medical and cultural context of the High Victorian age, I explore how poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), and Augusta Webster (1837-1894) not only participate in the preoccupation with unstable bodies and fluids, but capitalize on female leakage in an elaborate rhetorical strategy that embarks on a new embodied female poetics. Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and Webster’s Mother and Daughter all enlist the lactating and feeding breast in a series of elaborate metaphors of female identity construction, literary expression, and poetic voice.

This thesis examines the figure of Medusa in the works of three Victorian women: the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), and the artist Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919). For many in an era that sought to categorize women according to rigid social boundaries, Medusa embodied all that is suspicious, dangerous, and alluring about women. But in subtle and unexpected ways, these three women reimagined the Medusa archetype and used it to explore female experience and expression, as well as the challenges and complexities of female authorship. In their works, Medusa, like other hybrid personae such as the mermaid and the lamia, became a figure through which to explore liminal spaces and slippery categories. I argue that these women prefigured the twentieth-century feminist rehabilitation of Medusa. I also suggest that this proto-feminist transformation of the myth draws, directly and indirectly, from the tradition of Ovid, the first poet to suggest that Medusa’s monstrosity resulted from her victimhood and that her power is not merely destructive, but also creative. My analysis contends that, contrary to common understanding, women were revisioning Medusa’s meaning well before the twentieth century.