Abstract
Critics and historians agree that in nineteenth-century England the Medieval Revival was not only a powerful imaginative force in art and literature, politics and culture — most immediately apparent in the architecture of the age — but also ‘a territory of the mind’,1 inseparably interwoven with the fabric of nineteenth-century thought and touching all classes of Victorian society. There is also critical consensus that the nineteenth-century Medieval Revival was difficult to define and delimit (the term Middle Ages spans and apparently unifies many centuries) and had ‘no single significance or use’,2 and in generalist essays and volumes and specialist studies critics analyse the differing aspects of Medievalism’s variety of forms, particularly the Arthurianism which preoccupied Tennyson for more than fifty years.
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Notes
Alice Chandler, ‘Order and Disorder in the Medieval Revival’, Browning Institute Studies, 8 (1980), 1–9
Charles Dellheim, ‘Interpreting Victorian Medievalism’, in History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism, ed. Florence S. Boos (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 39–58
Hilary Fraser, ‘Victorian Poetry and Historicism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 114–36
Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1830–1890 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 45–50
David Newsome, The Victorian World Picture, 2nd edn (London: Fontana, 1998), pp. 177–90.
Eighteenth-century medievalism is examined in Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Clare Broome Saunders, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Extensively examined in Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971)
Inga Bryden, ‘Reinventing Origins: the Victorian Arthur and Racial Myth’, in The Victorians and Race, ed. Shearer West (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), pp. 141–55
Inga Bryden, Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends in Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal: Harvest House, 1982), pp. 1–2.
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 9.
Reginald Horsman, ‘Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850’, in Race, Gender, and Rank: Early Modern Ideas of Humanity, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1992), pp. 77–100
Rosemary Jann, ‘Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism’, Browning Institute Studies, 8 (1980), 129–49
Peter Mandler, ‘“In the Olden Time”: Romantic History and English National Identity, 1820–50’, in A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, C.1750–C.1850, ed. Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 78–92
Stephanie L. Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. v
Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe, ‘Introduction: Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus’, in The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition, ed. Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe (New York: Garland, 1988), pp. xi–xix
Inga Bryden, Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends in Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
Roger Simpson, Camelot Regained: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990).
Stephen Ahern, ‘Listening to Guinevere: Female Agency and the Politics of Chivalry in Tennyson’s Idylls’, Studies in Philology, 101 (2004), 88–112
Roger Simpson, ‘Costello’s “The Funeral Boat”: An Analogue of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”’, Tennyson Research Bulletin, 4 (1984), 129–31
Richard Barber, The Reign of Chivalry, 2nd edn (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), p. 169.
Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 112
Leonée Ormond, ‘Victorian Romance: Tennyson’, in A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary, ed. Corinne Saunders (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 321–40
Britta Martens, ‘“Knight, Bard, Gallant”: The Troubadour as a Critique of Romanticism in Browning’s Sordello’, in Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism, ed. Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer A. Palmgren (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 45.
Joseph Chadwick, ‘A Blessing and a Curse: The Poetics of Privacy in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”’, Victorian Poetry, 24 (1986), 13–30.
Carl Plasa, ‘“Cracked from Side to Side”: Sexual Politics in “The Lady of Shalott”’, Victorian Poetry, 30 (1992), 247–63.
Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., ‘Poetry as Vision: Sight and Insight in “The Lady of Shalott”’, Victorian Poetry, 19 (1981), 207–23
Kathy Alexis Psomiades, ‘“The Lady of Shalott” and the Critical Fortunes of Victorian Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 25–45
Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir By His Son (London: Macmillan, 1897), II, p. 130.
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1861), I, p. 199.
Charles Kingsley David: Four Sermons (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1865), p. 10.
Marcia C. Culver, ‘The Death and Birth of an Epic: Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur”’, Victorian Poetry, 20 (1982), 51–61
Dafydd Moore, ‘Tennyson, Malory and the Ossianic Mode: The Poems of Ossian and “The Death of Arthur”’, The Review of English Studies, 57 (2006), 374–91
[Richard Monckton Milnes], ‘Poems’, Westminster Review, 38 (1842), 371–90
Richard D. Mallen, ‘The “Crowned Republic” of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King’, Victorian Poetry, 37 (1999), 275–89
[John Sterling], ‘Poems’, Quarterly Review, 70 (1842), 385–416
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, ed. Cora Kaplan, 5th edn (London: Women’s Press, 1993), p. 201.
Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, 2nd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 263.
‘Wherefore, in these dark ages of the Press’ (1839), Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), pp. 148–9.
Cited in Edgar F. Shannon, Jr, Tennyson and the Reviewers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 62.
Dorothy Mermin, Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 21.
Marion Shaw, ‘The Contours of Manliness and the Nature of Woman’, in Critical Essays on Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (New York: Hall, 1993), pp. 219–33
John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire (Harlow: Pearson, 2005), pp. 1–5.
Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 2.
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J.H. Newman, The Idea of a University, Defined and Illustrated, ed. I.T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 179–81.
J.A. Mangan and James Walvin, ‘Introduction’, in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. J.A. Mangan and James Walvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 1–6
Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 1–2.
Edgar F. Shannon, Jr, ‘The History of a Poem: Tennyson’s Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’, Studies in Bibliography, 13 (1960), 149–77
Edgar F. Shannon, Jr and Christopher Ricks, ‘A Further History of Tennyson’s Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’, Studies in Bibliography, 32 (1979), 125–57.
Lytton Strachey (1921) cited in Elizabeth Langland, ‘Nation and Nationality: Queen Victoria in the Developing Narrative of Englishness’, in Remaking Queen Victoria, ed. Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 13–32
Cited in John Lucas, England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry 1688–1900 (London: Hogarth, 1990), p. 189.
Cited in Debra N. Mancoff, The Return of King Arthur: The Legend Through Victorian Eyes (London: Pavilion, 1995), p. 37.
See Edgar R Shannon, Jr and Christopher Ricks, ‘“The Charge of the Light Brigade”: The Creation of a Poem’, Studies in Bibliography, 38 (1985), 1–44
Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 197–200.
Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 121
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Peter Bunoughs, ‘Defence and Imperial Disunity’, in The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter, The Oxford History of the British Empire, III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 320–45
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J. Timothy Lovelace, The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 109.
Ann Thwaite, Emily Tennyson: The Poets Wife, 2nd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 524.
Linda K. Hughes, ‘Tennyson’s Urban Arthurians: Victorian Audiences and the “City Built to Music”’, in King Arthur Through the Ages, ed. Valerie M. Lagorio and Mildred Leak Day, 2 vols (New York: Garland, 1990), II, pp. 39–61
Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, ed. Miles Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 193.
[WE. Gladstone], ‘Idylls of the King [1859] and Earlier Works’, Quarterly Review, 106 (1859), 454–85
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© 2013 Marion Sherwood
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Sherwood, M. (2013). ‘To Serve as Model for the Mighty World’: Tennyson and Medievalism. In: Tennyson and the Fabrication of Englishness. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137288905_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137288905_6
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