Swinburne’s boyishness

buir.contributor.authorSelleri, Andrea
dc.citation.epage149en_US
dc.citation.issueNumber1en_US
dc.citation.spage135en_US
dc.citation.volumeNumber27en_US
dc.contributor.authorSelleri, Andrea
dc.date.accessioned2023-02-27T10:42:11Z
dc.date.available2023-02-27T10:42:11Z
dc.date.issued2022-02-12
dc.departmentDepartment of English Language and Literatureen_US
dc.description.abstractThis article reconsiders the early critical reception of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s 1866 collection Poems and Ballads with a view to articulating the extent to which the critical hostility that famously greeted the book upon publication was mediated by the category of ‘boyishness’. I show that the complaint that the 29-year-old Swinburne wrote, and by implication thought and felt, too much like a boy and not enough like an adult man lay at the core of the critical onslaught and contributed to underpin critics’ various complaints of obscenity, blasphemy, bad taste and so on. After considering the nature of the connection between the boyish quality often associated with Swinburne as a person throughout his life and the poetical ‘boyishness’ critics perceived in his work, I propose a taxonomy of three main meanings of boyishness that emerge from the early critics’ attacks: boyishness as lack of virility, boyishness as lack of self-restraint, and boyishness as lack of intellectual maturity. By analysing these critical readings in the context of various medical, pedagogical and more broadly cultural discourses of the time, I make the case that Swinburne found himself cast as someone who presented precisely the characteristics of boyhood of which a functioning adult man was supposed to rid himself. The broader argument is that by giving close attention to age-based slurs, we can gain a more fine-grained account of mid-Victorian attitudes to childhood and maturity, and society’s self-image more generally.en_US
dc.description.provenanceSubmitted by Ayça Nur Sezen (ayca.sezen@bilkent.edu.tr) on 2023-02-27T10:42:11Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Swinburne’s_boyishness.pdf: 216538 bytes, checksum: 0bb8ca3e12ac78f104610b358a2afb26 (MD5)en
dc.description.provenanceMade available in DSpace on 2023-02-27T10:42:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Swinburne’s_boyishness.pdf: 216538 bytes, checksum: 0bb8ca3e12ac78f104610b358a2afb26 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2022-02-12en
dc.identifier.doi10.1093/jvcult/vcac001en_US
dc.identifier.eissn1750-0133
dc.identifier.issn1355-5502
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11693/111812
dc.language.isoEnglishen_US
dc.publisherOxford University Pressen_US
dc.relation.isversionofhttps://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac001en_US
dc.source.titleJournal of Victorian Cultureen_US
dc.subjectSwinburneen_US
dc.subjectReceptionen_US
dc.subjectCriticismen_US
dc.subjectBoyishnessen_US
dc.subjectMaturityen_US
dc.titleSwinburne’s boyishnessen_US
dc.typeArticleen_US

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