SOURCE: "The Decade's Work in Browning Studies," in Browning Re-viewed: Review Essays, 1980-1995, Peter Lang, 1998, pp. 127-57.

In the following essay, Maynard reviews the critical issues concerning Browning's poetry which were debated throughout the 1980s. Maynard also traces the roots of such issues, noting the dependence of modern criticism on the work of earlier scholars.

When I was volunteered to write a summary of the decade's work in Browning criticism and scholarship for Victorian Poetry, this did not seem a too much larger task than the year's evaluations I have been turning out for most of this decade—only one-thousand percent. It was, in any event, not the entirely appropriate, but far too ambitious, task of a summary and evaluation of the century's work. The common wisdom is that criticism, and even editing practices, have (as you like it) finally come of age/gone entirely crazy or to...