CORNELIA D.J. PEARSALL5 Samuel Silas Curry, Browning and the Dramatic Monologue: Nature and
Interpretation of an Overlooked Form of Literature (1908; reprinted New
York: Haskell House, 1965), 13.
6 Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in
Modern Literary Tradition (New York: Random House, 1957), 182-83;
further page references appear in parentheses.
7 Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., "From Monomania to Monologue: 'St. Simeon Stylites'
and the Rise of the Victorian Dramatic Monologue," Victorian Poetry 22
(1984), 121-37.
8 Clyde de L. Ryals, Becoming Browning: The Poems and Plays of Robert
Browning, 1833-1846 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1983),
150-51.
9 While he does not emphasize the notion that dramatic monologues may labor
toward particular teloi or endpoints, E. Warwick Slinn explores aspects of the
genre's interest in change and transformation. He reads these poems chiefly in
the context of the Hegelian dialectical process, focusing on longer works such
as Tennyson's Maud (1855), Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage (1855),
and Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868-69); see The Discourse of the
Self in Victorian Poetry (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press,
1991).
10 For discussions regarding the representation of speech in perhaps the most
representative author of dramatic monologues, see Daniel Karlin on Browning's
"vocal" style in John Woolford and Daniel Karlin, Robert Browning, Studies in
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature (Harlow: Longman, 1996),
55-64, and E.A.W St. George, Browning and Conversation (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1993).
11 Among the most comprehensive examples of this approach are Ralph W. Rader,
"The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms," Critical Inquiry 3
(1976), 131-51, in which he draws distinctions between "expressive lyric,"
"dramatic lyric," "dramatic monologue," and "mask lyric"; and Culler, "Mono-
drama and the Dramatic Monologue."
12 Tucker, "From Monomania to Monologue," 121-22.
13 Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres
and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38.
14 Arthur Henry Hallam, The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T.H. Vail Motter
(New York: MLA, 1943), 197.
15 Benjamin Willis Fuson, Browning and His English Predecessors in the Dramatic
Monolog, State University of Iowa Humanistic Studies, VIII (Iowa City, IA:
State University of Iowa, 1948). Isobel Armstrong also suggests Letitia Elizabeth
Landon's The Improvisatrice (1824) as an originary instance of the form, and
argues that "it was the women poets who 'invented' the dramatic monologue":
Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 326.
16 Karlin makes this point, and notes that the term was first applied to Browning
in 1864; see Woolford and Karlin Robert Browning, 38, n. 3. Culler dates the
first use to 1857, as a title to a collection of poems by George W. Thornbury:
"Monodrama and Dramatic Monologue," 356.
17 Elisabeth A. Howe, The Dramatic Monologue, Studies in Literary Themes and
Genres (New York: Twayne, 1996), 3.
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