Abstract
The Princess(1847), whichTennyson 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 ofThe 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).
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Cultural Studies
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