Victorian Sappho [Hardcover]

Yopie Prins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 22, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0691059187 | ISBN-13: 978-0691059181

What is Sappho, except a name? Although the Greek archaic lyrics attributed to Sappho of Lesbos survive only in fragments, she has been invoked for many centuries as the original woman poet, singing at the origins of a Western lyric tradition. This text traces the emergence of this idealized feminine figure through reconstructions of the Sapphic fragments in late-19th-century England. The author argues that the Victorian period is a critical turning point in the history of Sappho's reception; what we now call "Sappho" is in many ways an artifact of Victorian poetics. The author reads the Sapphic fragments in Greek alongside various English translations and imitations, considering a wide range of Victorian poets - male and female, famous and forgotten - who signed their poetry in the name of Sappho. By "declining" the name in each chapter, the book presents a theoretical argument about the Sapphic signature, as well as a historical account of its implications in Victorian England. The text explores the relations between classical philology and Victorian poetics, the tropes of lesbian writing, the aesthetics of meter, and 19th century personificatios of the "Poetess".

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A remarkable new addition to the fields of gender studies, classical studies, and modern poetics, Yopie Prins's Victorian Sappho sends off many casually brilliant sparks, with a broad appeal that easily transcends disciplines. "Invoked as a lyric muse in antiquity and mythologized for posterity by Ovid," Sappho has always been "a figment of the literary imagination." Prins traces the 19th-century recovery of new fragments of Sappho's poems and the allure they held for classical philologists, who attempted to piece together not only her lyrics but her absent, impossible self--the feminine voice and the female body. In scholarly writing, as well as the work of Swinburne and countless popular poets like Felicia Hemans, Sappho eventually came to embody the Victorian definition of the lyric. The era's fascination with the "incomplete" Sappho carried over to this century in the modernist idealization of the fragment. The book features engaging scholarship--the introduction alone establishes Prins as a strong and subtle thinker--and is gorgeously written. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

"Prins' immersion in the Victorian art and literature of Sappho is deep; the sophistication of her approach is formidable. . . . By any measure this book is a debut of major ambition and considerable achievement." -- London Review of Books

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr (February 22, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691059187
• ISBN-13: 978-0691059181
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,647,093 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Find out who the most Sapphic poet of the Victorian Period was!, October 5, 2005

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G. Messersmith "calliopemuse" (Tennessee) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Victorian Sappho (Paperback)

Are you studying Sappho? How about Michael Field or Algernon Swinburne? This book covers in detail how Victorian poets were or were not like the Greek poet Sappho. During the Victorian time period, fragments were published of Sappho's work. This took the Victorians by storm. Dr. Henry T. Wharton published a book about Sappho entitled "Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation." Many writers and artists of the time were mesmerized by his book. Prin tells us that his book had a "broad circulation" and was reprinted 4 times between 1887-1907.

Prins is a Victorian scholar with a great deal of knowledge to bestow. In this particular book, she talks about the connection between Sappho's writing and legend and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Christina Rossetti; Mary Robinson; John Addington Symonds; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning; and many others. Prins states in her book "Rather than organizing the chapters to imply a developing tradition or a linear progression, I emphasize the continual recirculation of Sappho within Victorian poetry" (p. 15).