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Isobel Armstrong, FBA (born 1937) is a British academic. She is professor emerita of English at Birkbeck, University of London and a senior research fellow of the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. She is a fellow of the British Academy. She has been a visiting scholar at many institutions, including at Princeton University in 2016-2017. She is also a published poet. Armstrong is the younger sister of writer Diana Wynne Jones.
Career
Armstrong is a critic of nineteenth-century poetry, literature and women's writing. Her publications include Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2017), The Radical Aesthetic (2000), Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre (1999) and Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Politics and Poetics (1993). Her book Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination (2008) won the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize.
In Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Politics and Poetics, Armstrong contends that poems by women can speak double, using conventionally feminine modes as a “way of looking at conformity from within.” Armstrong uses Adelaide Procter as an exemplar, naming her as someone who “typifies the woman poet's interests at the time.” In her poetry in the English Woman’s Journal as well as in Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words, Procter deploys “often simple, often pious, often conventional” modes of address. However, “those conventions are subjected to investigation, questioned, or used for unexpected purposes.”
Possession: A Romance, the 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel by A. S. Byatt, was dedicated to Armstrong.
Publications
- George Eliot, Spinoza and the Emotions, chapter in A Companion to George Eliot, ed. Amanda Anderson, Harry E. Shaw, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013
- Steve Connor's Lightness of Being, Critical Quarterly, 56, July 2014
References
- "Fellows Directory: A". British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 27 April 2013.
- "Visiting Fellows 2016-17 — Princeton University Humanities Council". humanities.princeton.edu. Retrieved 7 October 2019.
- Craig, Amanda (March 2005). "Diana Wynne Jones interview". Archived from the original on 2 April 2013. Retrieved 28 April 2013.
- "James Russell Lowell Prize Winners". Modern Language Association. Retrieved 7 October 2019.
- ^ Armstrong, Isobel. (1993). Victorian poetry : poetry, poetics, and politics. London: Routledge. pp. 324, 336. ISBN 0415030161. OCLC 26674723.
- Byatt, A. S. (2001). "A. S. Byatt, The Art of Fiction No. 168". The Paris Review (Interview). Interviewed by Philip Hensher. Retrieved 14 April 2017.
I only knew one person in the world who really thought Victorian poetry was great poetry and that was Isobel Armstrong ... The book's dedicated to her.