This book offers a comprehensive interpretation of the entire range of Tennyson's poetry, with emphasis on the great period up to and including In Memoriam, but also with chapters on Maud, the Idylls of the King, and the best of the later poems. Taking the view that every poem contains its own literary history, Dwight Culler traces Tennyson's evolving image of himself as a poet and the relation of this image to changing literary structures. He particularly emphasizes the "frame" device by which Tennyson first mediated between himself and the world and then, inverting it,...

It was a pervasive belief among Victorian writers that their era was transitional in character, that they were moving from an outworn past into an unknown future and therefore needed to look to history for guidance. History was a mirror reflecting the present. On the basis of analogies and contrasts with earlier ages and cultures, the great Victorians tried to gain a sense of their own place in the continuum.
In this insightful and elegantly written book, A. Dwight culler explores the Victorians' uses of history, surveying the major authors and the intellectual and cultural currents of...