Stressing English: The Globalization of Victorian Meters
A special issue of Victorian Poetry (Winter 2011) edited by Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania
Thanks to some superb recent conferences and publications in Britain and the U.S., the study of the proliferation of old and new metrical forms in 19th-century poetry in English has shown itself to be anything but ahistorical formalism--not least by emphasizing the historicity of meter's mediation of voices and conditioning of ears. And we can see and hear more clearly now that the metrical history of English poetry is, among other things, an intersectional history of English-speaking nations and regions. Indeed, the last few years have brought major advances in the dialectical framing of the transatlantic "traffic in poems" between Britain and the U.S. Yet the Anglo-American binary continues to predominate, and the more broadly transnational, transformational circulation of 19th-century poetry in English remains largely to be charted. For this special issue of Victorian Poetry, we invite articles that extend this work throughout the Atlantic world and beyond: for example, to the Caribbean and North Africa; to South Asia and Australasia; to Canada and Hawaii; to sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. We would welcome submissions on the dispersal of Victorian meters into British provinces from Wales to Bengal; on poetry and the global rise of English; on "world literature" and the global constitution of the sounds of English poetry; on ethnographies of rhythm; on poetic meter and the rhythms of labor and migration; on the metrical dimension of translating poetry from and into English; on the poetry of pidgins and creoles; on the dissemination of English hymnody and other verse forms; on the racialization and deracination of rhythms; on comparativism and the institutionalization of the study of poetry; on prosody and colonialism; on pedagogical uses of meter; on metrical notation, transcription, and recording; on performance, syncretism, and acculturation.
Initial proposals and inquiries, which are welcome but not required, may be sent to the editor at cavitch@english.upenn.edu. Article submissions of five to seven thousand words, prepared in accordance with The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., will be due November 1, 2010, and should also be sent to cavitch@english.upenn.edu.