What is the future of Tennyson studies?

Any attempt at a definitive answer would be immediately suspect. The foregoing study demonstrates quite clearly that, like so many other great poets, Tennyson has had as many detractors as supporters. One might think his contemporary, Matthew Arnold, had him in mind when he observed in the opening line of his sonnet to Shakespeare: “Others abide our question. Thou art free.” Like all the “others,” Tennyson has certainly not been free from questions — about his artistry, his politics, his “representativeness” or his individuality. But there is no guarantee that in the next hundred years, scholars will be as interested in Tennyson or the Victorians as their predecessors in the twentieth century had been.

The signs for Tennyson are mixed. In the twenty years that closed the previous century, more than forty emerging scholars chose Tennyson as the subject for their doctoral dissertations. Quite a few of them have published all or part of their work: Richard Mallen, Dino Franco Felluga, A. A. Markley, Andrew Elfenbein, James Hood, Roger Platizky, and Owen Schur. In the first three years of the twenty-first century, Richard Marggraf Turley's The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature (2002) and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping Influence in Nineteenth- Century Literature (2002) include lengthy chapters on Tennyson in volumes that demonstrate the ways poststructuralist scholarship can contribute to our understanding of literature and the creative process. Even the Tennyson Society, long a bastion of what might be called traditional scholarship, has begun to publish the work of scholars more sensitive to late-century developments in theoretical criticism.