Shearer, Emily Carroll (Author)
Cultural studies approaches identify all texts as arising from cultural contexts, and as such inform the methodology of this study of Tennyson's poetry as mediating conflicting truth claims by aesthetic and spiritual spheres and materialist and empirical spheres of thought. John McGowan's description of modernity suggests a way of reading Tennyson's poetry as evidence of his involvement in an ongoing discussion involving competing claims to totality by these epistemologies. Tennyson was from early days interested in science, keeping abreast of current thought at Cambridge, and being elected to the Royal Society. While critics often see aspects of Tennyson's work as the complaints of an increasingly pessimistic, personally disappointed old man, this study suggests that his poems instead display his engagement with major epistemological issues in which he and others express distrust of the totalizing claims of science and materialism. This dissertation analyses poems written during various points in his career that deal with these issues. Chapter 1 discusses historical and cultural contexts of Tennyson's poems. Chapter 2 analyzes "The Palace of Art," an early poem, as displaying his concerns with astronomy and its implications regarding creationist accounts of the cosmos in terms associated with the great chain of being metaphor and its principles of unity and perfection. It also reflects concerns with the second law of thermodynamics regarding its theories of entropy and death. Chapter 3 analyzes In Memoriam as it addresses natural evolution in terms of what Darwin would later term "survival of the fittest" and in which Tennyson ultimately reaffirms the immortality of the soul in evolutionary terms. Chapter 4 examines "Locksley Hall" and "Locksley Hall Sixty Years Later," written forty years apart, and their reflections of Tennyson's adaptations of evolutionary theory to account for what the later poem marks as increasing cultural decay. Finally, Chapter 5 analyzes "The Higher Pantheism," "Parnassus," and "By an Evolutionist" as late poems that reveal persistent attempts to validate the aesthetic and spiritual as necessary contexts for understanding experience as illuminated by science.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/09(E), Mar 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1545622505.
Chapter
Stott, Rebecca;
(2013)
“Tennyson's Drift”: Evolution in “The Princess”
(/isis/citation/CBB001422072/)
Book
Purton, Valerie;
(2013)
Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001421851/)
Chapter
Nys, Michiel;
(2013)
“An Undue Simplification”: Tennyson's Evolutionary Afterlife
(/isis/citation/CBB001422075/)
Chapter
Ebbatson, Roger;
(2013)
Tennyson's “Locksley Hall”: Progress and Destitution
(/isis/citation/CBB001422071/)
Article
Jacob Jewusiak;
(2021)
Tennyson’s Wrinkled Feet: Ageing and the Poetics of Decay
(/isis/citation/CBB694766507/)
Chapter
Purton, Valerie;
(2013)
Darwin, Tennyson and the Writing of “The Holy Grail”
(/isis/citation/CBB001422074/)
Chapter
Rowlinson, Matthew;
(2013)
History, Materiality and Type in Tennyson's “In Memoriam”
(/isis/citation/CBB001422073/)
Thesis
Henchman, Anna Alexandra;
(2004)
Astronomy and the Problem of Perception in British Literature, 1830--1910
(/isis/citation/CBB001562098/)
Book
Henchman, Anna;
(2014)
The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB001550349/)
Chapter
Beer, Gillian;
(2013)
Systems and Extravagance: Darwin, Meredith, Tennyson
(/isis/citation/CBB001422079/)
Article
Elaine Bander;
(2021)
‘The Astronomic Muse’: Charles Burney and Astronomy
(/isis/citation/CBB202341709/)
Article
Zimmerman, Virginia;
(2012)
“Time Seemed Fiction”---Archaeological Encounters in Victorian Poetry
(/isis/citation/CBB001213318/)
Thesis
Boswell, Michelle Suzanne Lang;
(2014)
Beautiful Science: Victorian Women's Scientific Poetry and Prose
(/isis/citation/CBB001567563/)
Thesis
Ford, Natalie Ruth;
(2007)
The Fate of Reverie: A Study of Scientific and Literary Currencies in Britain, 1830--1870
(/isis/citation/CBB001562753/)
Article
Henderson, Andrea;
(2014)
The Physics and Poetry of Analogy
(/isis/citation/CBB001550338/)
Book
Gold, Barri J.;
(2010)
ThermoPoetics: Energy In Victorian Literature and Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001022926/)
Book
Tate, Gregory;
(2012)
The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830--1870
(/isis/citation/CBB001214624/)
Article
Schatz-Jakobsen, Claus;
(2008)
Wordsworth as Scatterbrain: Deconstructing the “Nature” of William Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes
(/isis/citation/CBB001031198/)
Thesis
Goldstein, Amanda Jo;
(2011)
“Sweet Science”: Romantic Materialism and the New Sciences of Life
(/isis/citation/CBB001567306/)
Book
Heringman, Noah;
(2004)
Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology
(/isis/citation/CBB000471556/)
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