Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry

This anthology of queer Victorian poetry, from the corpus of Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry, features poems by poets known to have identified with or expressed homosexuality and/or non-conforming gender identity, based on evidence from primary historical sources and recent scholarship. For this selection, queer has a capacious meaning: the nineteenth-century sense of questioning, strange, and peculiar, as well as our own contemporary sense of queer as non-heteronormative and non-traditional gender or sexual identity (OED online, queer, adj.1a, 3b). DVPP follows the approach of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present in acknowledging that gender is a complicated identity to apply to historical figures and their writings. While these selected poems could lend themselves to queer interpretation, a queer expression might not necessarily have been the intention of the poet, nor the understanding of Victorian readers. This poetry anthology is meant as a prompt to inspire further research. (BGL)