Christina Rossetti in Context

From the Publisher

"Will make a major change in how we read Christina Rossetti."— Jerome Bump

Library Journal

Harrison has written a solid piece of literary history, skillfully linking Ros setti's religious and Tractarian com mitment to her use of Pre-Raphaelite methods and motifs. He demon strates that she was a conscious artist who carefully revised her work, dis counting W.M. Rossetti's portrayal of her as merely ``casual and sponta neous.'' In making this case, and in discussing her relation to Dantean and Petrarchan traditions, Harrison uses a welter of modish critical terms. Fortunately, they fail to over whelm his exceptionally well-in formed study of a poet firmly rooted in her own era yet anticipating the self-reflexive poetic mode of our own. For academic and large public libraries.Barbara J. Dunlap, City Coll. Lib., CUNY