Tennyson's Rapture
Subtitle: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press
Published: December 25, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 408
ISBN-13: 9780195150544
Subjects: Plays & playwrights: 19th century; Poetry & poets: 19th century; Literary Criticism; Poetry; English; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Criticism & Collections / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Acting & Auditioning; Drama; 19th century; Dramatic monologues; Great Britain; History; History and criticism; Politics and literature
Description: "In the wake of the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, a beloved friend and the subject of In Memoriam. Tennyson wrote a range of formally inventive and intricately connected poems, many of which feature pivotal scenes of rapture, or being carried away. Pearsall explores Tennyson's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation - theological, social, political, and personal - and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics." "The book investigates the poet's previously unrecognized intimacy with theological movements in early Victorian Britain that propounded the innovative and highly influential belief in an oncoming rapture. Pearsall develops original readings of Tennyson's major classical poems by tracking his lifelong intellectual investment in philological scholarship and archaeological exploration, including Victorian debates over the historical verifiability of Homer's raptured Troy. Tennyson's attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, which are illuminated by Hallam's writings, and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall illustrates the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson's long career."--Jacket.