Robert Browning and twentieth-century criticism

Although several critical studies have considered Browning's reputation in his own day, there has been little attention to Browning's role in the development of twentieth-century literary study. Robert Browning and Twentieth-Century Criticism relates Browning's turn-of-the-century lionization by literary clubs and magazines to the development of professional literary research in American, British, and Commonwealth universities. Moving beyond the limits of conventional reception history, Professor O'Neill devotes special attention to Browning's famous courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Barrett. As part of the construction of this eminent Victorian, O'Neill traces the effects of the scandal over the publication of their love letters and the recent interests of feminists in Browning's life and letters. This discussion in turn reflects on the important role of biography in the changing emphases of literary criticism. As a history of academic responses to Browning, the work includes the contributions of prominent men and women of letters such as Vida Scudder, G. K. Chesterton, F. R. Leavis, and William C. DeVane, in addition to important postwar critics and theorists like Robert Langbaum, Harold Bloom, and Isobel Armstrong. Deftly analyzing how changes in the profession of literature have affected Browning's reputation, O'Neill reviews the relations of the academy to more general conceptions of twentieth-century culture.