Robert Browning

Browning has been identified as the greatest nineteenth-century poet of human psychology, but the category most popular in his own time defined him as a poet of 'the grotesque?. In this book, John Woolford undertakes to specify the precise meaning and scope of this term, in the process placing him in a major aesthetic tradition running from the Romantic Sublime through to modern concepts andtheorizations of the grotesque. This study subsumes the other major critical discourse fertilized by his work, the 'dramatic monologue?, but adds to the other notable features of it, such as its lucid language, and what has impeded his full appreciation hitherto, its difficulty. The study seeks, not to excuse but to explain and celebrate the intellectual white heat at which he worked, and to position all aspects of his output within a unified theory of its significance.