A great academic resource
Faas's text is an analysis of Victorian lyric and dramatic monologue. He argues that each genre models a type of subjectivity that was becoming more and more interesting as psychology developed as a field. Lyric was a spontaneous revelation of the self, valued for its transparency. Dramatic monologue was a case study of a speaker who is somehow outside the realm of sanity; this genre is valued for its capacity to safely contain mental perversity (e.g. Browning's "Porphyria's Lover"), like a textual Bedlam.
The book does a great job of providing background of the Victorian mental scientists and their field, and of drawing connections from there to the period's poetry. The poets covered extensively include Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and Swinburne. Faas also traces the British fascination with poetry of interiority back to Shakespeare. A valuable text for scholars and anyone interested in Victorian poetry and/or psychology.
