Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics

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Based on extensive archival research, Recovering Christina Rossetti resurrects a neglected female community and explores Rossetti's poetry from that perspective. This study sheds new light on the literary interests and abilities of Rossetti's mother and sister, highlighting continuities between the sisters' published works, and delving into the women's unpublished poetry, letters and marginalia to reveal the mother and sister's shaping influence on Rossetti's writing. Mary Arseneau theorizes Rossetti's 'incarnational poetics' and models new interpretative approaches that such poetics invite. She examines the ways in which Rossetti's self-expressions and religious devotion are reciprocally constitutive, and turns special attention to Rossetti's expressions of poetic independence: her critique of the expressive tradition of women's poetry, her disapproval of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti's mature poetic symbolism, her rejection of her father's interpretative methods, and her direct encounter with her strong poetic precursor, Dante.