Tennyson and Geology

This book offers new interpretations of Tennysons major poems along-side contemporary geology, and specifically Charles Lyells Principles of Geology (1830-3). Employing various approaches from close readings of both the poetic and geological texts, historical contextualisation and the application of Bakhtins concept of dialogism the book demonstrates not only the significance of geology for Tennysons poetry, but the vital import of Tennysons poetics in explicating the implications of geology for the nineteenth century and beyond. Gender ideologies in The Princess (1847) are read via High Millers geology, while the writings of Lyell and other contemporary geologist, comparative anatomists and language theorists are examined along-side In Memoriam (1851) and Maud (1855). The book argues that Tennysons experimentation with Lyells geology produced a remarkable uniformitarian poetics that is best understood via Bakhtinian theory; a poetics that reveals the seminal role methodologies in geology played in the development of divisions between science and culture, and that also, quite profoundly, anticipates the crisis in language later associated with the linguistic turn of the twentieth century.