Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy

Taking an original approach to Robert Browning's poetics, Martens analyses his work in relation to Romanticism and an evolving Victorian poetic culture. She goes beyond reductive interpretations of Browning as a self-effacing poet to reveal a highly self-conscious, self-dramatising and conflicted engagement with the Romantic tradition. Martens' Browning is a poet of complex contradictions and an illuminating case study in voice, authorial authority and self-reference.