Seeking to understand Tennyson's poetry as the work of a man concerned with making and then living up to one of the most famous names in Victorian literature, Anna Barton offers close readings of Tennyson's major works. From his obscure beginning as 'A.T.', one of two anonymous brothers, to the height of his success, when he held the impressive title 'Alfred Lord Tennyson, DCL, Poet Laureate', the development of Tennyson's career took place in a period increasingly aware that a name could command considerable cultural capital. In the marketplace goods were sold on the strength of their brand name; in the press the battle for signed articles was fought and won; and in Victorian drawing rooms young ladies collected the autographs of family and friends and pasted them into scrap books. From his early lyrics to his Arthurian Idylls, Barton argues, the laureate's keen sense of professional identity forced him to grapple with modern concerns about the ethics of print in order to establish his own responsible poetic.

Seeking to understand Tennyson's poetry as the work of a man concerned with making and then living up one of the most famous names in literature, Anna Barton offers close readings of major works from his early lyrics to his Arthurian Idylls. The laureate's keen sense of professional identity, Barton argues, forced him to grapple with modern concerns about the ethics of print in a market-driven age as he established his own responsible poetic.

Tennyson experienced at first hand the all-pervasive nature of celebrity culture. It caused him to retreat from the eyes of the world. This book delineates Tennyson's reluctant celebrity and its effects on his writings, on his coterie of famous and notable friends and on the ever-expanding, media-led circle of Tennyson's admirers.

The study of language was central to the thinking of Tennyson and his circle of friends. The period of his education was a time of interest in the subject, as a new form of philology became widely known and accepted in Britain. In this study, Donald S. Hair discusses Tennyson's own view of language, and sets them in the context of the language theories of his day. The scope of the book is broad. Hair draws upon a wide range of Tennyson's poetry, from a quatrain he wrote at the age of eight to an 'anthem-speech' he wrote at the age of eighty-two, and pays particular attention to two major works: In Memoriam and Idylls of the King. He explores these in relation to the two theoretical traditions Tennyson inherited. One is derived from Locke and the language theory set out in Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the other from Coleridge and the language theory of what Mill called the 'Germano-Coleridgian' tradition. He goes back to Plato's Cratylus and Aristotle's On Interpretation, and forward to the continental philology introduced into England by Tennyson's friends, Kemble and Trench, among others. Finally, he links Tennyson's language to thinkers such as Whewell, Hallam, and Maurice, who are not in themselves philologists but who make language part of their concerns--and Whewell was Tennyson's tutor, Hallam and Maurice his friends. Hair offers a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory in Britain while also providing some close readings of key passages of Tennyson's work and examinations of the poet's faith and views of society.

Alfred Tennyson was a poet all his life, writing more than a thousand works in virtually every poetic genre. Considered by his Victorian contemporaries the pre-eminent poet of the age, he has become a canonical figure who is widely read and studied today. Consequently, his poems appear on the syllabi of both survey courses in Victorian literature as well as upper-division and graduate-level topics courses that cover Victorian studies or address subjects such as environmental studies, religion, elegiac poetry, and Arthurian literature. This companion makes Tennyson's poetry accessible to contemporary readers by identifying some of the formal elements of the poems, highlighting their relevance to Tennyson's Victorian contemporaries, and explaining their enduring appeal and value. Entries in the companion, organized alphabetically, provide essential details about Tennyson's most anthologized poems, offer suggestions for reading and interpretation, and elucidate unfamiliar historical and literary allusions. Additional entries, a biography of Tennyson, and a selected bibliography of recent criticism offer information about the people, places, events, and issues that influenced Tennyson or were important to him and his contemporaries.

This 1992 study of Tennyson evolves its themes from the weaving figure of The Lady of Shalott, which becomes a kind of parable for the author and his texts. Taking its derivation from the Latin texere, 'to weave', Professor Joseph's focus on poetic texture and a sense of textuality leads to a consciousness of his own critical and interpretative weaving, while revealing a pattern in the fabric of Tennyson's work. This procedure brings together a theory of perception, developed in the first part of this study, with an analysis of the gendering of Tennyson's characters in the second part, and engages with the methodologies of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and gender theory. The weaving metaphor also opens up a key theoretical issue regarding Tennyson's poetics: is the textual shuttle managed by the controlling hand of a historically definable author, or is the poetic weaver 'cursed' like the Lady of Shalott to suffer a mystifying doom at the 'unseen hand' of an all-pervasive textuality that occludes authorial intention?