Pearl-divers of the Apocalypse: Christina Rossetti’s The Face of the Deep

This paper explores the rhetoric of surfaces and depths (familiar from her poetry) in Christina Rossetti's commentary on the Apocalypse The Face of the Deep (1892). The motives for such an undertaking are threefold: to observe the ways in which a rhetoric of textual depth masks conditions of production, while those very conditions are precisely what produce a depth-effect on the textual surface, to consider the nature of the distinction between the ‘face’, to a text and its ‘deep’, to increase familiarity with a little-read, but highly rewarding work.