Kissing by the book : form and feeling in Victorian poetry

This thesis argues for the importance of the kiss in Victorian poetry as a metapoetic device. Through close attention to the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde, it argues that the kiss allows not only for a means of tracing poetic inheritance, but a way of figuring and creating the affective powers of poetry. Characterised by an intensely self-conscious awareness of its own positioning as a historicised, socially informed, and deeply embodied practice, the Victorian kiss grants an exploration of the mutability of both poetry and body, emerging dialectically out of the relation between the body and culture. The Victorians create new forms of kisses, demonstrating a remarkable sensitivity to the plasticity of culturally informed categories. To this end, the thesis engages in the analysis of visual media – including paintings, photography, and film – as the kiss is informed through a meeting between the visual and the poetic, a meeting often imaginatively configured as its own form of kiss.