Post the Introduction of Your Most Recent Paper

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm writing this one paper really haphazardly and out of order so I'll just post the part I wrote first, which is actually being relegated to a footnote.

The Face of the Deep at times has the same insight and brooding vigor as Rossetti’s poetry at its best (“Goblin Market,” “When I am dead, my dearest”), which stands as a shining example of the Romantic-Gothic-Victorian aesthetic complex of representational non-realism that with a few exceptions such as Austen dominated English literature between Coleridge and Henry James; at other times it has the flabby morbidity of her poetry at its worst (Rossetti produced enough poetry to fill almost nine hundred pages in the Penguin Classics edition, meaning that some of her poems are bound to be stinkers). The theology expressed in it is fascinating but justly a bit repellent to current sensibilities—at one point a generally insightful and semi-sympathetic analysis of the figure of Eve turns into a meditation on womanhood that gives the Blessed Virgin Mary her Catholic prominence but her Protestant passivity. In the face of The Face of the Deep we must reread aspects of Rossetti’s poetry like the plea for female solidarity in “Goblin Market,” or the intimations of same-sex longing there and elsewhere, in the light of an over-idealized feminine centered on conventional Victorian values like patience and softness, and only secondarily if at all on the sort of intellectual and aesthetic exploration that characterized Rossetti’s own life and activities and that she represents to later feminist interpreters.