Swinburne

One thing one notices when reviewing last year's Swinburne materials is its lack of an overarching thematic thread. Swinburne is discussed in many different contexts that defy a single critical trend. On the one hand, this makes the work of the reviewer more challenging since it becomes harder to define a clear critical narrative. But on the other hand, such a broad array of readings also positively helps to expand Swinburne studies as a whole. In other words, the new direction in Swinburne studies is the lack of direction. This is a welcome development that brings to the fore the richness of the Swinburnean subject matters, and that will, I hope, encourage a further critical exploration of his corpus.

Possibly the most exciting publication of the past year, Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate (ed. Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013]) certainly contributes to the expansion of Swinburne studies by introducing a wide variety of critical voices and approaches. The eleven essays included in this volume were originally presented at the Swinburne Centenary Conference that took place at the Uni- versity of London in 2009. The volume is divided into three parts: "Cultural Discourse," "Form," and "Influence," which help define the different contexts in which Swinburne operated throughout his career. The section on cultural discourse includes four articles that explore Swinburne's interaction with broad nineteenth-century cultural phenomena. Evangelista's "Swinburne's French Voice: Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Mediation in Aesthetic Criticism" (pp. 15-32) draws attention to Swinburne's critical work and more specifically to his interest in French literature, which Evangelista perceives as expressing Swin- burne's attempt to promote "a theory of aesthetic cosmopolitanism" (p. 17). Julia F. Saville's "Swinburne's Swimmers: From Insular Peace to the Anglo-Boer War" (pp. 33-51) discusses Swinburne's use of swimming imagery in his republican poetry and traces the shift that took place in his political attitudes from radical- ism to conservatism. Charlotte Ribeyrol's "Swinburne: A Nineteenth-Century Hellene?" (pp. 52-68) explores Swinburne's fascination with the darker, more liminal aspects of Greek culture, which differed from the common Victorian view that regarded Hellenism as the epitome of rational order. Finally, Laurel Brake's "'A Juggler's Trick?': Swinburne's Journalism 1857-75" (pp. 69-92) focuses on Swinburne's rarely acknowledged career in journalism, and discusses the manner in...