Tracing the movement of print and literary forms in the later nineteenth century uncovers a complex transnatonality and intersectionality embedded in what might otherwise seem the most esoteric and confined of literary movements:  the fixed-form verse revival of the late 1870s and 1880s.   Reaching across national and temporal borders, the male coterie of Edmund Gosse, Austin Dobson, and Andrew Lang extolled villanelles, ballades, sestinas, rondeaux, and triolets as means to discipline contemporary English verse and delight connoisseurs. However, the movement did not stay confined within elite class or gendered formations, but infiltrated popular print in humorous penny weekly papers or political poems, and also beckoned women poets from A. Mary F. Robinson to Amy Levy to participate. Ultimately the fixed-form verse revival was a byproduct of a transatlantic literary market, so that the revival rested upon dynamic movements across bodies of water as well as across ostensible divides of nation, gender, and high versus popular culture.

Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at TCU, specializes in historical media studies (poetry, periodicals, serial fiction); gender and women’s studies; and transnationality.  Past monographs include The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (2010), Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (2005), and The Victorian Serial (with Michael Lund, 1991). She has also co-edited with Sharon M. Harris the 4-volume transhistorical Feminist Reader: From Sappho to Satrapi (Cambridge UP, 2013) and, with Sarah R. Robbins, Teaching Transatlanticism (Edinburgh UP, 2015). Her current book projects include the transdisciplinary essay collection Replication in the Long Nineteenth Century, which she co-edits with art historian Julie Codell (now in production at Edinburgh UP) and The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2018).