Compost Happens: Composition and Decomposition in Victorian Literature.

Species-old unease about the essential role played by decomposition in the bodily processes of death and life was complemented for the Victorians, as for us today, by an emergent concern with the fragility and mutability of the self. Literature from the period responded to this modern ambivalence in ways both direct and oblique—and most creatively when acknowledging that the authorial work of composition depended on, and remained in turn subject to, aesthetic processes of breakdown and recycling, transformation and decay. Examples from prose fiction (Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens) and nonfiction (Mill, Carlyle, Pater) frame analyses of poetry (Tennyson, Swinburne, Browning, Hardy) where the topic is analysis itself—that is, decomposition—brought into dialectical synthesis with the integrative character of artistic form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]