4. Expectation

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we explore the idea of expectation in Rossetti’s poetry, looking in particular at five poems: ‘Echo’, ‘A Fair World Tho’ A Fallen’, ‘Song (When I Am Dead, My Dearest)’, ‘Shut Out’, and ‘Behold, I Stand at the Door and Knock’.

Course

In this course, Dr Ross Wilson (University of Cambridge) explores the poetry of Christina Rossetti. Having begun with a summary of Rossetti’s critical reception, both in her own lifetime and then after her death, we then explore Rossetti’s poetry through five key themes: repetition, repetition, expectation, ambiguity and uncertainty, and the speaker. Throughout the course, several of Rossetti’s poems are discussed in detail, including: ‘Goblin Market’, ‘Remember’, ‘An Old-World Thicket’, ‘Echo’, ‘Up-Hill’, ‘Song (When I Am Dead My Dearest)’, and many more.

Lecturer

Ross Wilson was born in Salford and brought up in north Manchester, where he attended Philips High School and Bury College. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and University College London before completing his doctorate at Cambridge in 2004. He held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel (2004-7) and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Faculty of English, Cambridge (2007-9) before being appointed to a lectureship in Literature in the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2009. He returned to Cambridge in 2013 as Lecturer in Criticism in the Faculty of English and took up a fellowship at Trinity College. He is editor of Romantic Circles Reviews & Receptions and very occasionally tweets @RossWilso . In 2015-16 he is the Crausaz Wordsworth Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities.