Isobel Armstrong is Emeritus Professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.

Preface to the second edition Preface to the first edition Acknowledgements Introduction: Re-Reading Victorian Poetry Part 1: Conservative and Benthamite aesthetics of the avant-garde: Tennyson and Browning in the 1830s 1. Two systems of concentric circles 2. Experiments of 1830: Tennyson and the formation of subversive conservative poetry 3. 1832: Critique of the poetry of sensation 4. Experiments in the 1830s: Browning and the Benthamite formation 5. The politics of dramatic form Part 2: Mid-century: European revolution and Crimean War - democratic, liberal, radical and feminine voices 6. Individualism under pressure 7. The radical in crisis: Clough 8. The liberal in crisis: Arnold 9. A new radical aesthetic - the Grotesque as cultural critique: Morris 10. Tennyson in the 1850s: new experiments in conservative poetry and the Type 11. Browning in the 1850s and after: new experiments in radical poetry and the Grotesque 12. 'A music of thine own': women's poetry - an expressive tradition? Part 3: Another culture? Another poetics? Introduction: the 1860s and after: aesthetics, language, power and high finance13. Swinburne: agonistic republican - the poetry of sensation as democratic critique 14. Hopkins: agonistic reactionary - the Grotesque as conservative form 15. Meredith and others: hard, gem-like dissidence 16. James Thomson: atheist, blasphemer and anarchist - the Grotesque sublime 17. Alternative fin de siecles: Rudyard Kipling, Michael Field, Thomas Hardy and Alice Meynell Notes Indicative bibliography