This chapter considers William Morris’s first collection of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858). It starts by observing that the features of the collection given a difficult early reception by critics also ensured its popularity in the twentieth century. The chapter goes on to discuss Robert Browning’s influence on Morris and sets his manner of experimentation in the context of Pre-Raphaelite and medievalist aesthetics. Close attention is given to key poems from the collection, including ‘The Defence oThis chapter considers William Morris’s first collection of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858). It starts by observing that the features of the collection given a difficult early reception by critics also ensured its popularity in the twentieth century. The chapter goes on to discuss Robert Browning’s influence on Morris and sets his manner of experimentation in the context of Pre-Raphaelite and medievalist aesthetics. Close attention is given to key poems from the collection, including ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ and ‘The Haystack in the Floods’. f Guenevere’ and ‘The Haystack in the Floods’.

Victorian sculpture is less well-served by the scholarship than Victorian painting, and biblical sculpture ignored comparative to pieces inspired by Greco-Roman mythology. Rather than treat these as two separate strands, or, alternatively, assume that statues of Old Testament figures such as Eve and Rebecca were interchangeable with those of Venus and Psyche, this chapter thinks harder about how they relate. Looking first at free-standing sculpture, then at religious works in the private house, and finally at sculpture in the church, it hones in on affect to determine how the classical and biblical and the interactions and discrepancies between the two spoke to nineteenth-century British society, gender, belief and so on. As well as revisiting artists such as Thomas Woolner and John Gibson, it puts an emphasis too on women sculptors such as Emmeline Halse and on female representation, patronage and response to show that sculpture was as important in sermon-making as pictures.

Chapter 3 analyzes Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustrations alongside a formal analysis of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) to draw further attention to the creative and communal processes associated with intertextual collaborative production. Reading this collaboration through the lens of sympathetic collaboration allows for an understanding of fellow-feeling dependent on the articulation of both individual and communal viewpoints – acknowledging difference – and the means of self-assimilation to form community. Reading Goblin Market as a collaborative lyric establishes how the poem constructs a reproduction of the Rossetti collaboration and underscores the interrelationships between word and image and community development. Placing the poem alongside the reformative work Christina Rossetti completed at Highgate Penitentiary, this chapter provides a direct contextual link to sympathetic concord and its inflection of moral reform. Reading the Rossettis’ contemporaneous literary productions as sympathetic collaborations that inform one another reveals, more broadly, the interlacings of shared experiences and literary and artistic productions within the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Chapter one defines and historically situates the intersections among decadence, ecology, and the pagan revival in literature and art. Noting ecological, scientific, classist, nationalist, and imperialist aspects of decadence in its earliest articulations, focus is given to the shifting formulations of modern decadence in particular by such influential writers as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Bourget, and Max Nordau, the chapter offers close analyses of works by Algernon Swinburne such as his poem ‘The Leper’ (1866) and the Pre-Raphaelite artist Frederick Sandys such as his painting Medea (1868) that demonstrate the complex interplay across these concepts.

The truth of the work, as determined by its origin in personal existence, is fully revealed and realized only through interpretation by other individuals reading it in relation to their own existence in the course of a history of reception. The Vita nuova can stand as emblematic of this process and as illustrative of its exceptionally fecund results in literary history. Often touted as the first book of Italian literary tradition, the Vita nuova is a seed of the very process of a literary tradition disseminating itself through ongoing production of works as responses such as Dante himself elicits in circulating the sonnet about his initiatory dream to fellow poets. Especially revealing of the history of effects of this text are its artistic appropriations at various periods in the iconographical tradition. The Pre-Raphaelite depictions, notably by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, illustrate how subjectively driven interpretation can become relevant to revealing the original, but temporally unbounded meaning of a text. Rossetti’s, like Dante’s, personal preoccupations prove instrumental for disclosing and illuminating what can be lived as perennial and perduring truths about human existence.