Tennyson Among the Novelists

John Morton is Lecturer in English at the University of Greenwich, UK. He has published articles and chapters on Tennyson and is a contributor to the Guardian Books blog.

• Preface; 1. 'So word by word, and line by line, / The dead man touched me from the past': Theories of Influence; 2. 'This is what I call democratic art - the revelation of the poetry which lies in common things.': Tennyson in the Victorian Novel.; 3. 'The heat of life in the handful of dust': the Turn of the Century; 4. 'I hate great men': Tennyson in the Modernist Novel; 5. 'An infant crying in the night': D. H. Lawrence and Tennyson.; 6. 'Here at the quiet limit of the world': the 1930s and 1940s.; 7. 'Har fleag har fleag har fleag onward': Popular fiction post-1950.; 8. 'She has a lovely face:' Ladies of Shalott 1970-1990.; 9. 'A Hundred Years After': Tennyson in the 1990s.; 10. 'Sweet 'N Low': Tennyson today; Bibliography; Index.

John Morton's Tennyson Among the Novelists is a splendid piece of work: it is a highly informative and entertaining feat of sustained literary detection, finding the Laureate's influence, and his words, in a wide variety of unexpected places, but also an extraordinarily learned and judicious account of the relation between prose and poetry since Tennyson's time. The material Morton has unearthed is stimulating, and his quietly penetrating critical comments bring out its rich significance in a very impressive way. Tennyson in particular became a symbol of the Victorians to later generations, so his case is profoundly telling for the way modern writers have positioned themselves in relation to the past. This book is proof - if proof were needed - that allusion remains a crucial and immensely productive area of literary study.