| | | | | Research Interests Current and Recent Projects Dissertation Abstract Primary field: Nineteenth-century British literature, both the Romantics and the Victorians, with a particular focus on poetry. Other interests: Working-class poetry and autobiography; nationalist/patriotic verse and prose; national and regional identity; poetic theory; feminist theory; women writers; hypertext archives; humanities computing.   "Close Thy Byron: Nineteenth-Century Byronic Nationalisms." Book project. Work in progress. "Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe!"--with this dismissal of the most famous and successful poet of Britain's Romantic period, Thomas Carlyle called on English writers to renounce the Byronic hero of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Manfred. Victorian poets writing nationalist verse, however, were never free from Byron's influence. This study argues that the most significant Victorian poetic responses to Byron's nationalism--Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and Casa Guidi Windows, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Maud--reclaim the Byronic hero by casting him not as Carlyle's figure of Romantic narcissism but as a potent emblem of national identity and political engagement. Arson and Murder in Kate Chopin's At Fault. Under review. An short essay examining state law and vigilante justice in Chopin's novel. " 'At war with myself and a wretched race': Tennyson's Maud and the Exilic Experience." Work in progress. In this essay I argue for the centrality of exile in both Tennyson's early patriotic and exilic poetry, the 1830s and 1850s work as well as the 1852 poems, and the work I read as the culmination of that early trajectory, Maud. A patriotic volume centering on British masculinity and the performances and roles that such masculinity demands, Maud, and Other Poems celebrates a particular brand of heroism and personal will. In this volume, Tennyson's relentlessly Byronic anti-hero--the rejected son, spurned lover, melodramatic madman, frustrated exile, resigned warrior--rejects home in favor of the Crimean battlefield. For this man, self-exiling going to war constitutes a saner, more rational choice than staying home in an England he has come to despise. "Charlotte Smith's Exilic Persona." Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 8.2 (2010). 305-323. The essay argues that typical readings of Smith as a poet writing in a traditional Romantic mode, creating lyrics that depict a melancholic individual subject drawing inspiration and education from the natural world, risk marginalizing her. Recognizing exile as both biographical reality and literary trope is central to an understanding of Smith’s verse, for she also wrote poetry with a significant political agenda, one that distinguishes her from her early Romantic contemporaries and challenges the parameters of English Romantic nationalist discourse. "Protest and Performance: Ann Yearsley's Poems on Several Occasions." The Working-Class Intellectual in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Ed. Aruna Krishnamurthy. London: Ashgate, 2009. 49-66. I suggest that Ann Yearsley’s first volume of poetry has been ignored because of the instability of her relationship with patron Hannah More—since we can’t know just how much influence More had on various sections of the volume, critics shy away from it, preferring works created after the break with more. I argue that moving away from this volume denies us the opportunity to grapple with complicated questions of the patronage system, working-class literary authority, and late eighteenth-century education.     last updated July 2010 ©2010 Monica Smith Hart