Overview

In the wake of the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson wrote a range of intricately connected poems, many of which feature pivotal scenes of rapture, or being carried away. This book explores Tennyson's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation-theological, social, political, or personal-and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. The poet's fascination with transformation is figured formally in the genre he is credited with inventing, the dramatic monologue. Tennyson's Rapture investigates the poet's previously unrecognized intimacy with the theological movements in early Victorian Britain that are the acknowledged roots of contemporary Pentacostalism, with its belief in the oncoming Rapture, and its formative relation to his poetic innovation. Tennyson's work recurs persistently as well to classical instances of rapture, of mortals being borne away by immortals. Pearsall develops original readings of Tennyson's major classical poems through concentrated attention to his profound intellectual investments in advances in philological scholarship and archeological exploration, including pressing Victorian debates over whether Homer's raptured Troy was a verifiable site, or the province of the poet's imagination. 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 political and philosophical writings, and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall shows the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson's long career. Offering a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, this book argues against a critical tradition that sees speakers as unintentionally self-revealing and ignorant of the implications of their speech. Tennyson's Rapture probes the complex aims of these discursive performances, and shows how the ambitions of speakers for vital transformations in themselves and their circumstances are not only articulated in, but attained through, the medium of their monologues.

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This is undoubtedly one of the most impressive books on Alfred Tennyson to have appeared in many years. Tennyson's Rapture remains an extremely important contribution to the study of the dramatic monologue. The book is even more significant for the field of Tennyson studies, since it shows how even some of Tennyson's most personal works are embedded in a broad cultural and historical matrix. Pearsall's readings stand as a worthy complement to those of Herbert Tucker, and this is no small praise. This is a major work- erudite, comprehensive and cogent- that significantly enhances our understanding both of Tennyson and of Victorian poetry in general. -Victorian Studies<br> In Tennyson's Rapture Cornelia Pearsall joins the ranks of those gifted scholars who have opened our eyes to the intellectual demands and aesthetic grandeur of on of England's greatest poets. Throughout this magnificent study, Pearsall makes the strongest claims to date for the rhetorical efficacy of the Victorian laureate's influential dramatic monologues. Highly attentive to form, her imposing analyses reveal how Tennyson's major early works emerged from some of most urgent political, scientific, and theological debates of his time. --Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles<br> Pearsall's textured, responsive and resourceful readings stand comparison with the best in the field. This is deeply informed and fully pondered critical scholarship and its publication will reconfigure the field of debate about some of Tennyson's most-studied poems--and thereby about Victorian poetry's most-theorized genre, the dramatic monologue, which Pearsall restores to its roots in civic eloquence. --Herbert F.Tucker, University of Virginia<br>

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