Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, 1809-1892. In memoriam'

The primary purpose of this study is to show that anticipations of the "art for art's sake" theory can be found in Tennyson's poetry which is in line with the tenets of aestheticism and symbolism, and to show that Tennyson's lyricism is a "Palace of Art" in which his tragic emotions-- sadness, sorrow, despair, and melancholic sensibility--were built into beauty.

Ces travaux de recherche concernent le domaine des études victoriennes, au travers d'un éminent victorien s'il en fut, le poète lauréat Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). Ainsi que l'indique son titre, "l'imaginaire de Tennyson, 1820-1892" a pour objet précis un domaine de la poétique: l'imaginaire. Par une étude de l'œuvre en six parties chronologiques, la thèse analyse les images poétiques sous tous leurs aspects: la symbolique, la métaphore, la psychologie, la portée idéologique, la dimension picturale, l'insertion dans l'histoire littéraire. La thèse tend à démontrer: 1) que Tennyson révèle par le corps de son œuvre l'histoire des valeurs de la culture victorienne; 2) que Tennyson n'a cessé d'alimenter la culture de l’Angleterre victorienne minoritaire et constitue le chainon manquant reliant l'esthétisme de Keats à celui de Pater; 3) que Tennyson est le premier détenteur d'importance d'une poétique des compromis et des cohabitations paradoxales qu'imposent à la fois l'histoire britannique et l'ère marchande
This research production is directly relevant to victorian studies, as it deals with quite an 'eminent victorian': the poet laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). As is suggested by its title, Tennyson's imagery, 1820-1892 is in fact concerned with a specific field of poetics: imagery. Through an exhaustive study of tennyson's works along six chronological parts, this thesis proceeds with the analysis of poetical imagery in every important respect: symbols, metaphors, psychology, ideology, pictorial meaning, contextual literary relevance. The demonstrative aim consists in bearing sufficient proof that: a) Tennyson revealed, through the imagery in his works, part of the history of values current in succession within mainstream victorian culture; b) Tennyson meanwhile kept on feeding the cultural material used by victorian dissidents and stood as the missing-link between keat's aestheticism and pater's; c) Tennyson was the first major upholder of contradictory poetics of compromise, on account of the general paradoxes imposed on the poet through both britain's historical position and its triumphant industrial era

Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Princess: A Medley has posed interpretative difficulties for readers since its 1847 debut. Critics, editors, and artists contemporary with Tennyson as well as in this century have puzzled over the poem's stance on the issue of the so-called Woman Question. Treating Tennyson as the first reader of the poem yields an understanding of the title character, Princess Ida, as an ambassador of Tennyson's optimistic and evolutionary views of human development and links his work to that of visionary educators of nineteenth-century England. Later artists, however, produced adaptations of the poem that twisted its hopefulness into satirical commentary, reduced its complexities to ease the task of reading, and put it to work in various causes, many ranged against the improvement of women's condition. In particular, a series of editions carried The Princess into various nations, classrooms, and homes, promoting interpretations that often obscure Tennyson's cautious optimism.

Orientador: Yara Frateschi Vieira
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-18T07:12:55Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Abaurre_MariaLuizaMarques_M.pdf: 5360910 bytes, checksum: f9c3d6cf3762f54e4da6e93c50a0c136 (MD5) Previous issue date: 1993
Resumo: Não tem resumo na obra impressa. Base IEL resumo: Leitura comparativa de duas refacções da matéria de Bretanha produzidas no século XIX: Idylls of the King, de Alfred Tennyson, e A Connecticut Yankec in King Arthur's Court, de Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain). O interesse em um estudo comparativo das duas obras é grande, uma vez que, tendo utilizado o mesmo texto como fonte básica para suas refacções - Le Morte D'Arthur (Thomas Malory) -, Tennyson e Clemens produziram obras profundamente diferentes, tanto na abordagem quanto no tratamento da matéria de Bretanha. Da comparação feita entre as alterações promovidas por um e outro autor, ao trabalharem com o texto de Malory, é delineado um interessante quadro histórico-social, bem como são levantadas algumas hipóteses relativas à manutenção do interesse literário por histórias de natureza arturiana
Abstract: Not informed.
Mestrado
Teoria Literaria
Mestre em Letras

From Preface: A reader looking to this study for a charting of the diverse religious views held by Tennyson at different periods in his life may be disappointed. My primary concern has been not with religious forms, but with the numinous impulse. However, though I approached the topic with a completely open mind, I find my own Christian convictions have been strengthened through the study of Tennyson's poetry. As the title indicates, I have not attempted to deal with the plays. To explore both the poetry and the plays in a study of this length would have been impossible. I have perhaps been somewhat unorthodox in attempting to combine several disciplines, especially since I cannot claim to be a specialist in the areas concerned. However, I felt it necessary to approach the subject from a number of points of view, and to see to what extent the results could be said to converge on some sort of central "truth". When I have despaired of being able to do justice to a particular aspect within the imposed limits, I have sometimes found comfort in the words of Alan Sinfield (The Language of Tennyson's "In Memoriam", p.211): "We can only endeavour continually to approach a little closer to the central mystery; the ma j or advances will be infrequent, but most attempts should furnish one or two hints which others will develop. "

This thesis is a study of themes and genre in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. I have not attempted to present a survey of the body of critisicm on the cycle, nor have I attempted a comprehensive comparison of the poem with any of Tennyson's sources. The first chapter is based on A. Fowler's study of genres and I follow the implications of his work in my reading of the Idylls. Tennyson blends various generic strands in his cycle, in particular allegory, epic, dramatic monologue and the Alexandrian idyll, to create a complex psychological allegory of epic scope which both draws on traditional genres and extends them. I believe the Idylls should be read as a cycle and in the order in which Tennyson finally presented them; the ordering process is as much part of the creative process as the actual act of composition. I have adopted Priestley's sensible division of the twelve poems which he says "falls naturally into three groups of four, corresponding closely to the three acts of modern drama" (1960, p.252-254)" The second chapter begins the sequential examination of the first four "spring" and "summer" poems beginning with the symbolic The Coming of Arthur. This idyll begins Tennyson's Arthurian mythopoeia, creating a poetic kingdom of the mind. The "act" closes with the Geraint and Enid idylls, all four works in this section ending happily. The third chapter deals with the idylls which plot the corrupting and ever-widening influence of the adulterous relationship of Lancelot and Guinevere, one cause of the destruction of the institution of the Round Table. Other causes of the demise of Arthur's order are the pernicious influences of the evil Vivien and Modred and the meaningless and sterile spirituality that prompts the quest of The Holy Grail. The last four idylls chart the final collapse of Arthur's realm, the utter disillusionment of individual idealism - personified by Pelleas, an anachronistic spring figure who appears in Camelot's bleak and hostile winter - and the complete social decay which is demonstrated by the fiasco of The Last Tournament. The tragic denouement of the cycle, on both individual and social levels, is evident in Guinevere, in which Arthur's wretched and traitorous queen understands Arthur's vision, but too late to save Camelot from ruin. In the final framing idyll, The Passing of Arthur, Tennyson's myth is elevated to the level of universal significance, the Idylls of the King becoming "not the history of one man or one generation but of a whole cycle of generations" (Memoir, ii, p.127).

At the height of their popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, a vast transatlantic readership conferred on Longfellow and Tennyson the title "The People's Poet." This examination of Anglo-American Victorian poetry attempts to account for that phenomenon. A poetic work is first defined as an aesthetic experience that occurs within a triangular matrix of text, author, and reader. As reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss contends, both the creator's and the receptor's aesthetic experiences are filtered through a historically determined "horizon of expectations" that governs popular appeal. A historical account of the publication and promotion of Longfellow's and Tennyson's poetry provides empirical evidence for how and why their poetic texts appealed to a widespread readership. This account is followed by an analysis of the class and gender of Victorian readers of poetry that considers the role of "consumers" in the production of both poetry and poetic personae as commodities for public consumption. The development of each poet's voice is then examined in a context of a gendered "separate-sphere" ideology to explain how both Longfellow's and Tennyson's adoption of "feminine" cadences in their respective voices influenced the nineteenth-century reception of their work. The final two chapters analyze select texts—lyric and narrative—to determine reasons for their popular appeal in relation to the level of active reader engagement in the poetic experience. Through affective lyricism, as in Longfellow's "Psalm of Life" and Tennyson's "Break, break, break," these poets demanded that their readers listen; through sentiment transformed into domestic allegory, as in Miles Standish and Enoch Arden, these poets demanded further that they feel. While both Victorian poets were later decanonized by their modern successors, contemporary critics, mainly academic, have restored Tennyson to the literary canon while relegating Longfellow to a second-rate schoolroom status. The conclusion speculates on the possible reasons underlying the disparate reputations assigned to the two poets, both of whom, during their lifetimes, shared equally the fame and fortune that attended their role as "The People's Voice."
Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate

L’œuvre poétique d’Alfred Tennyson est cyclique. La répétition des mots, des thèmes et des personnages lui confère une dimension autoréférentielle. Le retour des refrains crée un effet de ressassement formel. Cette œuvre se concentre sur elle-même au point de s’affranchir des formes et des genres poétiques existants, à la recherche d’un langage qui lui est propre. L’écriture se prend elle-même pour objet et pour fin. La mélancolie au cœur de bien des poèmes devient un prétexte à écrire toujours plus car la dynamique de la sublimation mélancolique s’apparente au fonctionnement même du langage poétique, déploiement de signes autour d’un centre absent. Derrière la magie de la griserie du verbe, point pourtant le regard critique du poète qui se pose sur la société de son temps et se cristallise autour de la figure de la femme. Le texte poétique se redéfinit finalement comme un espace de différence où se donne à voir et à entendre la capacité (pro)créatrice d’une écriture « au féminin »
Alfred Tennyson’s poetical work is cyclical. The recurrence of words, themes and characters confers a self-referential dimension on it. The return of refrains creates a sense of formal repetitiousness. As they concentrate on their own working, the texts free themselves from existing poetical forms and genres, looking for a language of their own. The recurring theme of melancholy becomes a pretext to keep writing: the sublimation of the impossible work of mourning reveals something of the essence of poetical language as the proliferation of signs around a void. The poet’s critical vision of his society nevertheless appears behind his delight in the resources of language as he focuses on feminine characters. The poetical text is finally redefined as a space of difference where the feminine (pro)creative power of Tennyson’s poetical language can be heard and seen

viii, 214 p.
In this study, I examine the various techniques used by poets to provide consolation. With Tennyson's In Memoriam, I explore the relationship between formal and thematic consolation, i.e., the ways in which the use of formal elements of the poem, particularly rhyme scheme, is an attempt by the poet to attain and offer consolation. Early in his laureateship after the Duke of Wellington's funeral, Tennyson wrote "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," but this poem failed to meet his reading audience`s needs, as did the first major work published after Tennyson was named Poet Laureate: Maud. I argue that form and theme are as inextricably linked in Maud as they are in In Memoriam, and in many ways, Maud revises the type of mourning exhibited in In Memoriam. Later, I examine in greater detail the hallmarks of Victorian mourning. Although most Victorians did not mourn for as long or as excessively as Queen Victoria, the form her mourning took certainly is worth discussion. I argue that we can read Tennyson's "Dedication" to Idylls of the King and his "To the Mourners" as Victorian funeral sermons, each of which offers explicit (and at times, contradictory) advice to the Queen on how to mourn. Finally, I discuss the reactions to Tennyson's death in the popular press. Analyzing biographical accounts, letters, and memorial poems, I argue that Tennyson and his family were invested in the idea of "the good death"; Tennyson needed to die as he had lived--as the great Laureate.
Committee in charge: Richard Stein, Chair; Tres Pyle, Member; Deborah Shapple, Member; Raymond Birn, Outside Member

My thesis is that many of Tennyson's apparently paranormal experiences are explicable in terms of temporal lobe epilepsy; and that a study of the occurrence, in the work of art, of phenomena associated with these experiences, may be useful in elucidating the workings of the aesthetic imagination. A body of knowledge relevant to paranormal experience in Tennyson's life and work, assembled from both literary and biographical sources, is applied to a Subjective Paranormal Experience Questionnaire, compiled by Professor V.M. Neppe, in order to establish the range of the poet's apparently "psychic" experiences. The information is then analysed in terms of the symptomatology of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), and the problems of differential diagnosis are considered. It is shown, by means of close and comparative analyses of a number of poems, that recurring clusters of images in Tennyson's poetry may have their genesis in TLE. These images are investigated in terms of modern research into altered states of consciousness. They are found to be consistent with a "model" of the three stages of trance experience constructed by Professor A.D. Lewis-Williams to account for shamanistic rock art in the San, Coso and Upper Paleolithic contexts. My study of the relevant phenomena in the work of a nineteenth century English poet would seem to offer cross-cultural verification of the applicability of the model to a range of altered-state contexts. This study goes on to investigate some of the psychological processes which may influence the way in which pathology is manifested in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. But, throughout the investigation, the possible effects of literary precursors and of other art forms are acknowledged. The subjective paranormal phenomena in Tennyson's poems are compared not only with some modern neuropsychiatric cases, but also with those of several nineteenth-century writers who seem to have had similar experiences . These include Dostoevsky and Edward Lear, who are known to have been epileptics, and Edgar Allan Poe. Similarity between some aspects of Tennyson's work and that of various Romantic poets, notably Shelley, is stressed; and it is tentatively suggested that it might be possible to extrapolate from my findings in this study to a more general theory of the "Romantic" imagination.

La demoiselle d'Escalot (La Mort Artu) qui meurt d'amour pour Lancelot est l'ultime espoir du monde arthurien et l'entraîne avec elle dans sa disparition. Figure synthétique et mnémonique du Lancelot-Graal, c'est une mise en abyme du roman et du cycle. Elle réapparaît dans la littérature de toute l'Europe médiévale (hébrai͏̈que, italienne, anglaise, allemande, néerlandaise et catalane). Au XIXe, un poème de Tennyson porté par l'iconographie en fait une figure de proue de la littérature anglo-saxonne. En France, elle est reprise, mais dépourvue de la dimension contextuelle et symbolique de La Mort Artu et des attributs emblématiques de l'héroi͏̈ne tennysonienne elle ne soulève pas l'enthousiasme. Elle finit par s'effacer de la mémoire collective au profit de l'Elaine de Malory (Morte Darthur), son plus illustre descendant, à qui l'on attribue l'exclusive paternité de celle de Tennyson. Or le plus célèbre personnage arthurien de l'Angleterre victorienne est également inspiré de La Mort Artu
In the French Mort Artu, Arthur's kingdown disappears with the maiden of Escalot. The story of the maiden who dies of unrequited love for Lancelot of the Lake synthetizes and reminds the whole Vulgate Cycle. In the Middle Ages, it is retold in Hebrew, Italian, English, German, Dutch and Catalan. With Tennyson's Elaine of Astolat, it comes to the first place in Victorian litterature. The character is said to be derived from Malory's, but it is actually more indebted to the Mort Artu, through its 16th century Italian translation. The modern French retellings of the story, though numerous, have been overlooked, due to the lack of contextual and symbolic meaning

The Idylls of the King, d’Alfred Tennyson, fut dès sa parution (1859) très populaire. Son sous-titre initial, « The True and the False », constitue le fil directeur des quatre poèmes du recueil, qui se développent autour d’interprétations erronées. Lever le voile sur la véritable identité d’une personne, voir la réalité en face, ou même comprendre qui l’on est vraiment : les Idylls se résument à une longue et difficile recherche de la vérité à laquelle s’ajoute une question morale, le bien et le mal en chaque personne. Les Idylls mettent en garde le lecteur contre les apparences trompeuses et les êtres corrompus. Le recueil inspira de nombreux artistes, notamment préraphaélites. À l’époque édouardienne, les Idylls, devenues un « classique », firent à nouveau l’objet d’éditions illustrées. Comment les artistes (Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, Florence Harrison, Jessie M. King et John Byam Shaw), généralement issus du Préraphaélitisme, illustrent-ils la thématique de la vérité ? La thèse montre comment le thème de la vérité est transposé et adapté dans les illustrations : malgré une apparente correspondance entre les Idylls et les images, les illustrateurs édouardiens se détachent des points de vue développés par le poète et ses personnages, et les critiquent implicitement. Par ailleurs, ils mettent en relief la dimension imaginaire du texte : leurs images permettent alors de s’évader des poèmes, en stimulant les facultés créatrices du lecteur
Published in 1859, Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King was an instant literary success. Its original subtitle, “The True and the False”, is the central theme of the four poems of the volume, which all deal with misperceptions, misunderstandings and misinformation. The Idylls can be seen as a long and challenging pursuit of the truth, since they show the heroes lifting the veil on their partner’s real identity, facing the truth, or trying to define their true selves. The poems also raise moral questions related to good and evil within men and women. In other words, the Idylls may be read as a warning against misperceptions and corrupt behaviours. The Idylls became a source of inspiration for many artists, including the Pre-Raphaelites. During the Edwardian era, Tennyson’s work, raised to the status of a classic, was again published in illustrated editions. How did the artists chosen here—Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, Florence Harrison, Jessie M. King and John Byam Shaw, most of them affiliated to Pre-Raphaelitism—illustrate the question of Truth and Falsehood? This thesis shows how the theme of truth is depicted and adapted in the illustrations. Despite their apparent faithfulness to the poems, the Edwardian illustrators distance themselves from the poet’s or the characters’ point of view, while implicitly criticizing it. Besides, they highlight the imaginary dimension of the text. Thus, their illustrations stimulate the reader’s fancy and his or her inner dream world

Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Tennyson, and Virginia Woolf: three major figures of British art and letters who have received much critical attention individually, but have not yet been studied together. In this project I consider the valedictory works of these artists at their convergence, first through their obvious geographic, familial, and aesthetic relationships, then in more subtle, deeper, and overarching dimensions. The chief texts that are the focus of this dissertation are Tennyson's Idylls of the King, plus five of the Laureate's most popular poems; Cameron's photographic illustrations of these poems; and a selection of Virginia Woolf's late work, with a focus on "The Searchlight," Three Guineas, Between the Acts, and Anon. The dissertation also makes use of apposite poems, essays, life writing, and fiction created by these artists. Since "The Theatre of Anon" focuses primarily on Cameron's Illustrations, a chapter containing photographs of all the books' pages concludes the dissertation text. An additional selection of images is included as an appendix, in support of the central thesis of this project. The complex friendship between Tennyson and Cameron inspired the latter's only published book, a collection of poetic excerpts accompanied by images of his poems staged as scenes from amateur theatricals. The photos, with the photographer acting as their playwright-director, evoke the literary pageant in Woolf's last novel. In photographing the Illustrations, Cameron took control of the Laureate's poetry, metaphorically assuming the role of Vivien stealing Merlin's poetic spells. This dissertation traces Woolf's perception of her great aunt as it evolved over the decades, beginning with the eccentric, affected, and comical Cameron of Freshwater (1926) and ultimately portraying her as a dynamic, determined, and creative artist who helped provide inspiration for the character of the playwright-director Miss La Trobe of Between the Acts (1940). I argue that her great aunt's work influenced Woolf to create the figure she called Anon as a counterpart to Tennyson's King Arthur, and to place La Trobe's pageant-play at the center of her last novel, Between the Acts, as a final act of homage to Cameron. An aggregate of all anonymous minstrels, artists, and authors who ever lived, Anon appears in the guise of Miss La Trobe, whose communal, participatory art demonstrates how the traditionally monocular "eye" of history can be enlarged in community theatre from a single "I" to a collaborative project accommodating multiple perspectives. The Arthurian chivalry to which the ideology of Anon is set in counterpoint represents a conservative point of view based on the belief in a divinely-ordained social order headed by a monarch, with prescribed roles for each of its members. Valor in combat and devotion in courtly love, chivalry's two chief expressions, are the basis of Arthur's knightly code, which has influenced British national character and identity from the country's founding. Arthur reached his Anglophone apotheosis in the nineteenth-century's Gothic revival, epitomized in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. At the end of her career, at the start of the Second World War, Woolf came to believe that theatrical performance offered a better paradigm for social organization than the chivalric hierarchy at the root of the patriarchal British Victorian culture in which she had grown up. She saw in the community theatre a gathering place that could foster moments of transcendent unity, intellectual freedom, and imaginative inspiration, and in drama an art form resilient enough to withstand an audience's interruption and disillusionment. Performance provided a collaborative alternative to the conservative constraints that were her Victorian legacy; history, she felt, could be more accurately portrayed through the accretion of expressive theatrical performances than by the monolithic, linear narrative it had become as the official transcript of the nation's past. The theatricals scenes of La Trobe's pageant and Cameron's Illustrations - both composed of scraps and fragments of quotidian life rearranged and recombined - offer a new visual conception of the past. Working at the level of what Walter Benjamin has called photography's optical unconscious the dissertation demonstrates how Cameron's photographs reveal a reconstellation or reconfiguration, of the dominant British narrative from defamiliarized versions of the past that resonate with La Trobe's pageant. I propose that Cameron's photos re-envision canonical texts, inspiring a new mythology for Woolf, one that reflects a fluid and elastic version of the British national story. Challenging the received Carlylean conception of history as the biographies of great men, Woolf's counter-history, like Cameron's book of illustrations, features ordinary men and women playing extraordinary roles. The legendary Arthur, traditionally credited with uniting the country's thirteen tribes, founding Britain, and shaping the nation's identity, is but one actor among many in Woolf's pageant of history; his starring role in Tennyson's Idylls of the King is reduced to a few key scenes in the Illustrations and a cameo appearance in Between the Acts. Woolf implies that though there may still be room in history's narrative for heroic men, they will no longer dominate it. With its evolving, democratic nature, the community theatre created by Anon offers a paradigm of citizenship and social organization that Woolf believed could encompass British history, re-envision it, and offer the world's citizens hope for the future.