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“Yet Many of These Are Askew”: On Imitation, Originality, and Parody in Swinburne's Heptalogia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Jennifer A. Wagner Lawlor
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Extract

Algernon Charles Swinburne's Specimens of Modern Poets: The Heptalogia or The Seven Against Sense, a volume of parodic poems published in 1880, is a text that has sparked little modern criticism, and even those few remarks seem to take the volume about as seriously as contemporary critics did, seeing it essentially as a mark of Swinburne's well-known talent for imitation. Andreas Höfele, the most recent critic to mention the work, is perhaps the first to consider the work as more than a literary lark, seeing in it a self-conscious reflection upon the procedures of literary imitation, and upon Swinburne's own artistry. Höfele's valuable but rather general comments lack detailed analysis, and any greater specificity in his article only goes so far as to say that the volume aims its wit at “poetry with a message,” and has particular sport with the more “earnest” of the poets, namely Tennyson and Patmore. Jerome McGann's Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism does mention The Heptalogia in the context of Swinburne's talent for pastiche and imitation — but he places the parody volume outside of Swinburne's primary intentions: “These things [The Heptalogia and his other literary ‘hoaxes and burlesques’] are much, it is true, but they also seem, as it were, the outlying territories of an ideal center within which he would live” (80). This dismissal, on top of lack of attention to The Heptalogia, needs to be remedied, and it is the intention of this essay to do so.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , fall 1998 , pp. 237 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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