Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book articulates a range of nuanced attitudes towards its central topic 'beauty' and its representation in literary, as well as other cultural, forms. It involves a historical concern with the pressures brought to bear on and answered by the idea of beauty from the Victorians onwards. The book traces the fortunes of beauty across the best part of two centuries and several literary cultures through carefully chosen texts and authors. Running from Charlotte Bronte, Dickens and Wilde, to T.S. Eliot, Whitman, Stevens, Auden, Frost and Bishop, and finishing with essays on Hopkins, Yeats, Hart Crane and Spender, and Graves and MacNeice, and with more general reflections on beauty and modernity, the volume seeks to be full of provocations to thought. The book moves from fiction to poetry, out of a wish to highlight comparisons between the presentation of beauty in different literary genres.