Reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Suggesting that Rossetti’s work should be approached through his poetry, Brian Donnelly argues that it is both inscribed by and inscribes the development of verbal as well as visual culture in the Victorian period. He situates Rossetti’s poetry as the key to all of his work and central in its representation of the dominant discourses of the Victorian era: faith, sex, consumption, death, and the nature of representation itself.