Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T11:30:17.804Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

TENNYSON'S THE PRINCESS AND THE CULTURE OF COLLECTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2016

Jill Marie Treftz
Jill Marie Treftz*
Affiliation:
Marshall University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The Princess (1847), which Tennyson himself famously dismissed as “only a medley” (qtd. in Hallam Tennyson 2.71), presents itself as a cacophonous tangle of poetic experimentation and narrative diversity. Even the frame narrative of The Princess, which ostensibly provides a rationale for the tonal discontinuities of the fantastic tale of gender, education, and sexual dominance that comprises its internal story, creates further confusion by establishing seven largely unidentifiable narrators, an unclear number of intercalary singers, and a poet-speaker whose supposed efforts to compile and record the tale end not in a cohesive narrative, but in a text that moves “as in a strange diagonal” between burlesque and heroic, comic and tragic, narrative and lyric (Conclusion 27).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 239 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Allen, David Elliston. The Victorian Fern Craze: A History of Pteridomania. London: Hutchinson, 1969.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean. “The System of Collecting.” Trans. Cardinal, Roger. The Cultures of Collecting. Ed. Elsner, John and Cardinal, Roger. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. 7–24.Google Scholar
Beck, Curt, and Shennan, Stephen. Amber in Prehistoric Britain. Oxford: Oxbow, 1991.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Collecting.” Trans. Zohn, Harry. Selected Works. Vol. 2. Ed. Jennings, Michael W., Eiland, Howard, and Smith, Gary. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1999. 486–93.Google Scholar
Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Bergonzi, Bernard. “Feminism and Femininity in The Princess.” The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations. Ed. Armstrong, Isobel. New York: Routledge, 1969. 35–50.Google Scholar
Black, Barbara J. “‘The works on the wall must take their chance’: A Poetics of Acquisition.” Victorian Poetry 32.1 (1994): 1–20.Google Scholar
Boyd, Peter D. A. “Pteridomania – the Victorian Passion for Ferns.” Antique Collecting 28 (1993): 9–12.Google Scholar
Buchanan, Lindal. “‘Doing battle with forgotten ghosts': Carnival, Discourse, and Degradation in Tennyson's The Princess.” Victorian Poetry 39.4 (2001): 573–95.Google Scholar
Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa. “Marginalized Musical Interludes: Tennyson's Critique of Conventionality in The Princess.” Victorian Poetry 38.2 (2000): 227–48.Google Scholar
Colley, Ann C. “Colonies of Memory.” Victorian Literature and Culture 31.2 (2003): 405–27.Google Scholar
Conrad, Peter. The Victorian Treasure-House. London: Collins, 1973.Google Scholar
Davenport, Hester. “‘A Gothic Ruin and a Grecian House’: Tennyson's The Princess and Mid-Victorian Architectural Theory.” Victorian Studies 32.2 (1989): 209–30.Google Scholar
Dickens, A. G.The English Reformation. New York: Schocken, 1964.Google Scholar
Dietrich, Manfred. “Unity and Symbolic Structure in Tennyson's The Princess.” English Studies in Canada 11.2 (1976): 182–202.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. “Tennyson: Politics & Sexuality in ‘The Princess’ and ‘In Memoriam.’” 1848: The Sociology of Literature. Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1977. Ed. Barker, Franciset al.Colchester: U of Essex, 1978.Google Scholar
Filippoupoliti, Anastasia. “Spacializing the Private Collection: John Fiott Lee and Hartwell House.” Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting. Ed. Povtin, John and Myzelev, Alla. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. 53–70.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frank, Katherine, and Dillon, Steve. “Descriptions of Darkness and Self-Control in Tennyson's The Princess.” Victorian Poetry 33.2 (1995): 233–55.Google Scholar
Hall, Donald. Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists. New York: New York UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Herbert, Isolde Karen. “‘A Strange Diagonal’: Ideology and Enclosure in the Framing Sections of The Princess and The Earthly Paradise.” Victorian Poetry 29.2 (1991): 145–59.Google Scholar
Johnston, Eileen Tess. “‘This were a medley’: Tennyson's The Princess.” ELH 51.3 (1984): 540–84.Google Scholar
Joseph, Gerhard. Tennysonian Love: The Strange Diagonal. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1969.Google Scholar
Killham, John. Tennyson and The Princess: Reflections of an Age. London: U of London, Athlone, 1958.Google Scholar
Kozicki, Henry. Tennyson and Clio: History in the Major Poems. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Ley, Willy. Dragons in Amber: Further Adventures of a Romantic Naturalist. New York: Viking, 1951.Google Scholar
Merrill, Lynn L.The Romance of Victorian Natural History. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Garden City: Doubleday, 1970.Google Scholar
Millhauser, Milton. “Tennyson's Princess and Vestiges.” PMLA 69.1 (195): 337–43.Google Scholar
Pagani, Catherine. “Objects and the Press: Images of China in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press. Ed. Codell, Julie F. Cranbury: Associated UP, 2003. 147–66.Google Scholar
Pattison, Robert. Tennyson and Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Ricks, Christopher. Tennyson. 2nd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.Google Scholar
Rieger, Christy. “Tennyson's The Princess as Palimpsest: The Oriental Tale and Woman's Nature.” Double Vision: Literary Palimpsests of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Lewes, Darby. Lanham: Lexington, 2008. 105–16.Google Scholar
Rigby, Douglas, and Rigby, Elizabeth. Lock, Stock and Barrel: The Story of Collecting. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1944.Google Scholar
“Rosary.” Def. 1. OED Online. Oxford UP, 2014. Web. 10 Jun. 2014.Google Scholar
Schor, Naomi. “Collecting Paris.” The Cultures of Collecting. Ed. Elsner, John and Cardinal, Roger. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. 252–74.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Stafford, Robert A.Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration, and Victorian Imperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Tennyson, Alfred Lord. The Princess. 1847. The Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Ricks, Christopher. London: Longmans, 1969.Google Scholar
Tennyson, Hallam. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir. 1897. 2 vols. New York: Greenwood, 1969.Google Scholar
Tucker, Herbert. Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Watson, Jeanie. “Tennyson's The Princess: The Ideal of ‘Like in Difference.’” South Central Review 4.1 (1987): 63–81.Google Scholar
Whittingham, Sarah. The Victorian Fern Craze. Oxford: Shire, 2009.Google Scholar
Wickens, G. Glen. “The Two Sides of Early Victorian Science and the Unity of ‘The Princess.’” Victorian Studies 23.3 (1980): 369–88.Google Scholar
Wright, Barbara Herb. “Tennyson, the Weird Seizures in The Princess, and Epilepsy.” Literature and Medicine 6 (1987): 61–76.Google Scholar
Yanni, Carla. Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.Google Scholar