SOURCE: "Dante Rossetti: Parody and Ideology," in Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology, University Press of Virginia, 1990, pp. 90-107.

In the following essay, Harrison discusses the parodic nature and self-consciously aesthetic ideology of Rossetti's poetry.

In a recent essay, Claus Uhlig comes to the problematic conclusion that many literary works, because of their deliberate intertextuality, concern themselves preeminently with their own histories or genealogies. "It is doubtlessly true, and all the more so since the Romantic era," he insists, "that the aging of poetic forms and genres constantly increases their selfconsciousness as knowledge of their own historicity. Through this progressive self-reflection, whose sphere is intertextuality, literature is in the end transformed into metaliterature, mere references to its own history."¹ For Uhlig views of history and of the self in relation to history—especially our creations or works in relation to past works—are deeply ideological.² As...