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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
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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 

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