Office: Muenzinger D148E
Emily Harrington teaches and writes about Victorian literature, poetry and poetics, aestheticism, and women’s writing. She received her BA from Wesleyan University and her PhD from the University of Michigan. Harrington’s writing examines the place of poetry in Victorian culture, addressing questions of how poetry shapes and is shaped by experience. Her first book, Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Women Poets and the Bonds of Verse, argues that women poets viewed lyric poetry as relational and interactive, rather than as an expression of a solitary soul, focusing on “thou” as much as “I.” Harrington’s next project, The Poetics and Politics of Waiting in Victorian Poetry, will investigate temporality and a dynamics of deferral in a variety of poets. For a number of Victorian poets, action can be counterproductively rash and patience is required for both aesthetic and social progress.