Christina Rossetti

[Shannanigan]

Okay, due to imposed deadlines, I have been cornered into claiming "Christina Rossetti" as my general topic for a 10-page research paper due at the end of this semester in my British Literature course. Our book has a one and a half page biography and a handful of poems by her, including "Goblin Market," which is what attraced me to choosing her for this paper (it was either choose or the professor chose for you, and I hate surprises...).

Anyways, I desperately need to narrow my topic, obviously. You think that since my job is helping other students do this that it would be easy, but I feel stuck. I don't want to do a biography of her, but it would be nice to analyze her works in some way, especially Goblin Market, I haven't read it all, but it seems so wild and cool, I like it so far.

Anybody have some general directions I can turn to? Is she known for any literary devices in particular? 10 pages would seem so much more attainable if I had some idea of what I was doing, lol.

[subterranean]

Hi Shannanigan, I’m not familiar with Christina Rossetti. However, I can only suggest that if you're looking for a topic, theme(s) in her works might be quite an interesting topic. Some authors have specific themes, which they constantly portrayed (implicit or explicitly) in their work. And these themes are most likely the manifestation of their personal passions/interests. Related to that, we can also dig on the backgrounds or the motives behind these passions/interests, and we can also explore further how these interests brought influence, not only to the later artists that came after them, but also to the development of the respective field of art (e.g. new movements in poetry, new genres, etc).

Good luck!

[ShoutGrace]

Hey there Shannanigan,

I'm not sure if you've had a chance to look around the Internet yet, but a search brought up this web site (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/crov.html), which looks awesome, actually.

I'll look around a little bit more when I have more time. :D

[Shalot]

Here is another Web site:

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/scholl.html

Possible topics to discuss:

1) The significance of hair in Victorian lit/poetry and in this poem in particular (hair is power/sexuality -- all the women in Victorian art have long flowing hair)
2) What does the fruit represent?
3) Sexuality in the Victorian era
4) Lizzie is the symbol of Christ, Laura represents Adam and Eve and the fall, the Goblins represent Satan (Marian Shalkhauser contributed this analysis)

Christina Rossetti was religious and you might be able to pull ten pages out of this whole line of thought if you add something about how her beliefs influenceher poetry. You could also talk about repressed sexuality in the Victorian era......

[mono]

For a biography, and I hate to take the 'easy way out,' I usually will stick with Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Rossetti), finding this entry about her rather accurate to my knowledge.
In terms of her poetry, she seemed one of the poets who highly popularized the technique of the iambic pentameter; reading several of her poems, you will notice this rhythm commonly utilized by her. Besides that, not to call her necessarily common, she used many other techniques by poets of her era: lots of metaphors, similes, various rhyme schemes. Notice also her manner of giving various non-human objects human-like attributes, common among a few poets of her time, but something worth noticing; I always considered Christina Rossetti one of the 'nature lovers' similarly among the transcendentalists.
If you would like some help analyzing Goblin Market, let me know, and I would love to help; definitely let me know with some spare time, however, due to its length. A copy (http://users.crocker.com/~lwm/goblin.html) for those unfamiliar. ;)
Good luck!

[Shannanigan]

Thank you all very much! Shalot...you've given me some good ideas, especially since I decided to try and focus on examining Goblin Market. I appreciate everything, guys, I'm gonna go visit the sites now :p thanks again!