Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics offers a range of Pre-Raphaelite literary scholarship, provoking innovative discussions into the poetic form, gender dynamics, political engagement, and networked communities of Pre-Raphaelitism. The authors in this collection position Pre-Raphaelite poetics broadly in the sense of poiesis, or acts of making, aiming to identify and explore the Pre-Raphaelites’ diverse forms of making: social, aesthetic, gendered, and sacred. Each chapter examines how Pre-Raphaelitism takes up and explores modes of making and re-making identity, relationality, moral transformations, and even, time and space. Essays explore themes of formalist or prosodic approaches, expanded networks of literary and artistic influence within Pre-Raphaelitism, and critical legacies and responses to Pre-Raphaelite poetry and arts, codifying the methods, forms, and commonalties that constitute literary Pre-Raphaelitism.

Heather Bozant Witcher is Assistant Professor at Auburn University at Montgomery, USA. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century poetics, collaboration, and sociability, as well as archival theory and digital humanities.

Amy Kahrmann Huseby is Assistant Teaching Professor at Florida International University, USA, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century poetics, gender and sexuality, race and empire, and the history of science.