Content area
Full text
The Dramatic Monologue, by Elisabeth A. Howe; pp. xix + 166. New York Twayne Publishers, 1996, $24.95.
Two observations from Isobel Armstrong's brilliant and compendious Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993) suggest the difficulty of the topic Elisabeth A. Howe takes on in the volume under review. On the one hand, Armstrong suggests, "it is arguable that the 'pure' dramatic monologue is an invention of the twentieth century" (294); on the other, that "it was the women poets who 'invented' the dramatic monologue" (326)-a reference, in the first instance, to the dramatic personae adopted by Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Felicia Hemans in volumes published in the 1820s. The two claims, which I have quoted out of context, are not really contradictory. Both are part of a sustained analysis of the multiple historical determinations of the experiments with personae that flowered so richly in the poetry of the 1820s and 1830s, and of the various cultural and political meanings of the inflections these determinations receive in the works of different writers. Armstrong reveals the accepted canon of the Victorian dramatic monologue, founded on poems by Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, to be only one strand in a broad fabric of generic hybridization and of experimentation with dramatic forms. This canon, moreover, like the principles of inclusion and exclusion that govern it, is formed only from the retrospect of the twentieth century.
The broad point is one that affects all studies of genre. The works that define a genre are produced at...