Chapter 5 explores how Harriet Martineau’s travel narrative Eastern Life, Present and Past and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “The Burden of Nineveh” organize time through ruins from the eastern Mediterranean. Eastern Life, which was criticized for its unorthodox historicization of Christianity, imagines how ruins themselves experience human empires across centuries. The temporal form of the ruin, Martineau shows, is a capacious present in which the revolutions of human religions and empires become insignificant. Rossetti’s poem, which focuses on ancient Assyrian relics arriving at the British Museum, similarly surrenders human duration to the ruin’s own temporality. For Rossetti, the museum’s attempts to redefine the ruin within its own linear historicism necessarily fail because the ruin has already proven its endurance through many changing imperial narratives. Both Rossetti’s and Martineau’s texts depict ruin as a temporal form that outlasts any empire’s claims to significance, challenging the centrality of human experience in time.

Chapter 5 considers ecphrasis less as an anxious competition between visual and verbal arts than as another form of sociable relations between persons and things. The chapter looks especially at collections by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (“Sonnets for Picture”) and the two women poet-lovers who wrote together as Michael Field, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Sight and Song). Following the example of Keats, these poets used grammatical questions (whose ecphrastic uses go back to classical epigrams and idylls) to structure their encounters with works of visual art. Embodying vision in both conversational syntax and poetic (and sometimes typographic) form served their larger efforts to restructure social and sexual relations in the politically charged moment of 1848 (for Rossetti) and at the end of the century (for Michael Field). They sought to draw works of art out of commodity relations and into something that looked like conversation, repersonalizing and reimagining the forms of sociability in which objects and persons might participate.

Chapter 3 analyzes Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustrations alongside a formal analysis of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) to draw further attention to the creative and communal processes associated with intertextual collaborative production. Reading this collaboration through the lens of sympathetic collaboration allows for an understanding of fellow-feeling dependent on the articulation of both individual and communal viewpoints – acknowledging difference – and the means of self-assimilation to form community. Reading Goblin Market as a collaborative lyric establishes how the poem constructs a reproduction of the Rossetti collaboration and underscores the interrelationships between word and image and community development. Placing the poem alongside the reformative work Christina Rossetti completed at Highgate Penitentiary, this chapter provides a direct contextual link to sympathetic concord and its inflection of moral reform. Reading the Rossettis’ contemporaneous literary productions as sympathetic collaborations that inform one another reveals, more broadly, the interlacings of shared experiences and literary and artistic productions within the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

The truth of the work, as determined by its origin in personal existence, is fully revealed and realized only through interpretation by other individuals reading it in relation to their own existence in the course of a history of reception. The Vita nuova can stand as emblematic of this process and as illustrative of its exceptionally fecund results in literary history. Often touted as the first book of Italian literary tradition, the Vita nuova is a seed of the very process of a literary tradition disseminating itself through ongoing production of works as responses such as Dante himself elicits in circulating the sonnet about his initiatory dream to fellow poets. Especially revealing of the history of effects of this text are its artistic appropriations at various periods in the iconographical tradition. The Pre-Raphaelite depictions, notably by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, illustrate how subjectively driven interpretation can become relevant to revealing the original, but temporally unbounded meaning of a text. Rossetti’s, like Dante’s, personal preoccupations prove instrumental for disclosing and illuminating what can be lived as perennial and perduring truths about human existence.