Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880) arrived in Sydney in 1838 and became almost immediately notorious for her poem "The Aboriginal Mother," written in response to the infamous Myall Creek massacre. She published more poetry in colonial newspapers during her lifetime, but for the century following her death her work was largely neglected. In recent years, however, critical interest in Dunlop has increased, in Australia and internationally and in a range of fields, including literary studies; settler, postcolonial and imperial studies; and Indigenous studies. This stimulating collection of essays by leading scholars considers Dunlop's work from a range of perspectives and includes a new selection of her poetry.

The third edition of the Victorian Era volume of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature includes a number of changes and new additions, including the complete texts of In Memoriam A.H.H., The Importance of Being Earnest, Carmilla, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as Contexts sections on 'Work and Poverty,' 'Women in Society,' 'Sexuality in the Victorian Era,' 'Nature and the Environment,' 'The New Woman,' and 'Britain, Empire, and a Wider World.' The third edition also offers expanded representation of writers of color, including Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Toru Dutt, Mary Ann Shadd, and Rabindranath Tagore.

Victorian poetry shocks with the physicality of its formal effects, linking the rhythms of the human body to the natural pulsation of the universe. In "Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics "Jason R. Rudy connects formal poetic innovations to developments in the electrical and physiological sciences, arguing that the electrical sciences and bodily poetics cannot be separated, and that they came together with special force in the years between the 1830s, which witnessed the invention of the electric telegraph, and the 1870s, when James Clerk Maxwell's electric field theory transformed the study of electrodynamics.
Combining formal poetic analysis with cultural history, Rudy traces the development of Victorian physiological poetics from the Romantic poetess tradition through to the works of Alfred Tennyson, the "Spasmodic" poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Algernon Swinburne, among others. He demonstrates how poetic rhythm came increasingly to be understood throughout the nineteenth century as a physiological mechanism, as poets across class, sex, and national boundaries engaged intensely and in a variety of ways with the human body's subtle response to rhythmic patterns. Whether that opportunity for transcendence was interpersonal or spiritual in nature, nineteenth-century poets looked to electricity as a model for overcoming boundaries, for communicating across the gaps between sound and sense, between emotion and thought, and--perhaps--between individuals in the modern world.
"Electric Meters" will appeal to those interested in poetry of any period and particularly those interested in nineteenth-century culture and history.