Interviewed by Simon Whitaker

Clara Dawson, Visiting Professor from the University of Manchester, discusses poetry as a window into the nineteenth century

  

What drew you to the poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century? 

I think for our own culture poetry occupies a very marginal role, but in the nineteenth century it was hugely important and it really mattered as a literary form, because it worked as a way of interpreting the age to itself. It was also in competition with the novel, but something like Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning was very much an epic poem seeking to understand what it meant to be a Victorian living in Britain and Europe back then.

At the time, more people were reading poetry than ever before, due to the growth of reading in general and especially among the expanding middle-class and working-class audiences. I think it was a form that allowed writers and readers to think about some of the biggest questions of the Victorian era, whether that’s loss of faith and religion, developments in science, or national identity.

So, in the book I’m currently revising, I’m partly asking, ‘What was the role of poetry within the culture of the period?’ Particularly, I’m interested in how experiments in poetic form and poetic genre were shaped by these dialogues between writers and readers or between poets and reviewers. That can be on the level of choosing to write an epic poem in blank verse – as we see with Aurora Leigh – or on the level of choosing certain rhyme schemes or stanzaic forms to express particular ideas.

 

Why is it so important to look at this relation between an art form, such as poetry, and those cultural discourses around it?

This is something I do a lot when I’m teaching. If we’re looking at a topic such as, say, ‘celibacy’ or ‘marriage’, or the notion of ‘the fallen woman’ in literature, I get students to look at newspaper reports, or the online database where you can get parliamentary reports, or Oscar Wilde’s trial papers. I think for me it’s a matter of trying to get students to understand the singularity of what literature does: how literature can formulate and express ideas in a way that these other discourses can’t. It’s also about understanding the vitality of literature to its own specific cultural moment, and the way it interacts with other ideas and other discourses in the culture at large, rather than treating it as a kind of aesthetic object that can be isolated from its period.

I think that my book and research, at the moment, could be placed alongside other people doing something called historical poetics. This is something that people like Yopie Prins and Simon Jarvis have written about; to sum up that argument in brief, we understand poetry better if we locate it within understandings of poetry in the period. That might be looking at histories of metrical prosody, or perhaps how poetry is related to Anglican liturgy or hymns, but the argument would be that it’s a way of mitigating the imposition of our own perspectives on that poetry.

Your Visiting Professorship here is part of a specific project between the English department here and at Manchester. Can you tell me about that?

We wanted to try and get students studying Victorian literature at both institutions to try and collaborate. I’m particularly interested in using more innovative forms of assessment and getting students to do something that moves beyond the traditional essay format. So in Manchester we’ve been getting our students to go to a museum that has a Victorian exhibit, and they have to either write an exhibition guide or they have to make a podcast about that exhibit. The idea is that the students in Hong Kong will choose an object here, and students in Manchester will choose an object in Manchester, and they produce parallel work. But that is a challenge. For example, one thing I’ve used with students in Manchester is Twitter, but in Hong Kong – I think – people don’t tend to use Twitter that much!

Was this particular exchange, which is very targeted towards these two institutions and cities involved, inspired by anything else you’d seen?

Actually, it came about after I attended a conference here, about two and a half years ago, organized by Dr Jessica Valdez and Prof. Julia Kuehn, on Victorian democracy. I felt like I was challenged to open up my perspective on Victorian literature, as well as on the network here within Asia – this conference involved people from Japan, from Singapore, from South Korea. And I thought I would really like to bring that challenge I experienced into the way I teach.

Next year Jessica and I will probably do some of these collaborative assessments and we might also think about a summer school. We haven’t thought about graduates yet – it would be a really interesting possibility to do an exchange of Teaching Assistants, but the difficulties of funding are very pertinent here as well, with the cost of flying between the two places.

What we’re doing is a very small exchange, something that I’ve set up with Jessica and Julia, and I think there are a lot of constraints on our time as academics; there are a lot of different pressures to deal with. In the UK there’s uncertainty about universities, and what universities will look like in a post-Brexit landscape. We’re keeping our ambitions quite small at the moment, because we’re not necessarily sure how things will develop. But in some ways, if you can stay small and remain informal, you gain room for manoeuvre and to be more inventive and flexible.

Published on: November 8, 2018 < Back >