Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lake, Carolyn
• Mandy Treagus
• Madeleine Seys
• Sharon Crozier-De Rosa
• Maggie Tonkin

Titel

‘All the world is blind’: unveiling same-sex desire in the poetry of Amy Levy

Ist Teil von

• Changing the Victorian Subject, 2014, p.241-258

Ort / Verlag

Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Amy Levy was a late-nineteenth-century British writer whose short life produced three novels, three collections of poetry, and numerous short stories and essays. She was active in the 1880s intellectual culture of Bloomsbury and acquainted with such figures as Olive Schreiner, Vernon Lee, the Black sisters, Eleanor Marx and Grant Allen. Levy's scholarly and creative writings reflect a keen awareness of contemporary literary and cultural movements, often prefiguring discussions regarding feminism and modernism which would not take place until after her death in 1889. In 1883, Levy published an essay in The Cambridge Review on the writings of James ‘B.V.’ Thomson, author of epic poem ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ (1874-1880). Levy observed of Thomson that[h]e is distinctly what in our loose phraseology we call a minor poet; no prophet, standing above and outside things, to whom all sides of a truth (more or less foreshortened, certainly) are visible; but a passionately subjective being, with intense eyes fixed on one side of the solid polygon of truth, and realizing that one side with a fervour and intensity to which the philosopher with his birdseye view rarely attains. (501)The narrative perspective that Levy alludes to here, a literary mode that eschews omniscience and distanced objectivity in favour of a ‘passionate’ partiality, is a technique she would later adopt in her third and final collection of poetry published in 1889 shortly after her death, A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse.