Downing Fellow’s new book published
Dr Ewan Jones’ (Downing Fellow in English) new book The Turn of Rhythm: How Victorian Poetry Shaped a New Concept has been published by the University of Virginia Press.
The Turn of Rhythm explores how until the turn of the nineteenth century the word ‘rhythm’ was not widely used, nor had any cultural connotations. The book traces the complex way in which anglophone culture ‘got rhythm’, concentrating on the pivotal role that poetry played in this.
Dr Jones uncovers how several nascent discursive fields - ranging from speech therapy to idealist philosophy to anthropology and the thermal sciences - perceived a growing need to conceptualise rhythm, and he demonstrates the centrality of poetry to that development.
Drawing on the work of Robert Browning, George Eliot, Alice Meynell and A. C. Swinburne, as well as on the philosophy, science, and anthropology of the day, he traces the history of the concept of rhythm with the hope of enabling it to perform new work in the ongoing education of our bodies and minds.
“As a historian of eighteenth and nineteenth-century poetry, I’ve long held the intuition that something fundamental changed in the discourse around rhythm at this critical juncture,” Dr Jones said.
“It wasn’t until I began working on a collaborative project, which conducted computational analysis of large datasets, that I obtained a quantitative metric of this shift.”
Published 9 November 2023