This thesis examines the work of the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson and the treatment of religion in his works during the increasingly scientific Victorian Era.

Mourning rituals and memorial aesthetics played an integral role in Victorian England. Queen Victoria's poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, confronted death on a literary level. His national elegiac poetry — addressed to Victoria — is illuminated when read as a funeral sermon. By drawing out the funeral sermon techniques Tennyson incorporates, we see that he assumes a role as religious mediator to counsel and comfort Victoria in her grief. Tennyson's funeral sermon message alters quite distinctively from Albert's death in 1861, to the death of the Duke of Clarence in 1892, where he makes a final effort to restore the Queen to an acceptance of her state and lead her to an active, healthy type of mourning. The corresponding poems, "Dedication" and "The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale: to the Mourners," highlight Tennyson's unique role as spiritual guide for Queen Victoria, and can be read as a series of funeral sermons. Indeed, Tennyson incorporates various funeral sermon elements over decades in order to encourage the Queen to heal and cope with the trauma of death in the royal family.

Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Princess: A Medley has posed interpretative difficulties for readers since its 1847 debut. Critics, editors, and artists contemporary with Tennyson as well as in this century have puzzled over the poem's stance on the issue of the so-called Woman Question. Treating Tennyson as the first reader of the poem yields an understanding of the title character, Princess Ida, as an ambassador of Tennyson's optimistic and evolutionary views of human development and links his work to that of visionary educators of nineteenth-century England. Later artists, however, produced adaptations of the poem that twisted its hopefulness into satirical commentary, reduced its complexities to ease the task of reading, and put it to work in various causes, many ranged against the improvement of women's condition. In particular, a series of editions carried The Princess into various nations, classrooms, and homes, promoting interpretations that often obscure Tennyson's cautious optimism.

‘The poet’, Eliot wrote, ‘is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist’. This dissertation is an investigation into the ways in which four poets – Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – imagine what it might mean to labour in verse towards the ‘frontiers of consciousness’. This is an old question about the value of poetry, about the kinds of understanding, feeling, and participation that become uniquely available as we read (or write) verse. But it is also a question that becomes peculiarly pressing in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. In my introductory chapter, I sketch out some of the philosophical, theological, and aesthetic contexts in which this question about what poetry might do for us becomes particularly acute: each of these four poets, I suggest, invests in verse as a means of sustaining belief in those things that seem excluded, imperilled, or forfeited by what is felt to be a peculiarly modern or (to use a contested term) ‘secularized’ understanding of the world. To write poetry becomes a labour towards enabling or ratifying otherwise untenable experiences of belief. But while my broader concern is with what is at stake philosophically, theologically, and even aesthetically in this labour towards the frontiers of consciousness, my more particular concern is with the ways in which these poets think in verse about how the poetic organisation of language brings us to momentary consciousness of otherwise unavailable ‘meanings’. For each of these poets, it is as we begin to listen in to the paralinguistic sounds of verse that we become conscious of that which lies beyond the realms of the linguistic imagination. These poets develop figures within their verse in order to theorize the ways in which this peculiarly poetic ‘music’ brings us to consciousness of that which exceeds or transcends the limits of the world in which we think we live. These figures begin as images of the half-seen (glimmering, haunting, dappling, crossing) but become a way of imagining that which we might only half-hear or half-know. Chapter 2 deals with Tennyson’s figure of glimmering light that signals the presence, activity, or territory of the ‘higher poetic imagination’; In Memoriam, I argue, represents the development of this figure into a poetics of the ‘glimpse’, a poetry that repeatedly approaches the horizon of what might be seen or heard. Chapter 3 is concerned with Hardy’s figuring of the ‘hereto’ of verse as a haunted region, his ghostly figures and spectral presences becoming a way of thinking about the strange experiences of listening and encounter that verse affords. Chapter 4 attends to the dappled skins and skies of Hopkins’ verse and the ways in which ‘dapple’ becomes a theoretical framework for thinking about the nature and theological significance of prosodic experience. And Chapter 5 considers the visual and acoustic crossings of Eliot’s verse as a series of attempts to imagine and interrogate the proposition that the poetic organisation of language offers ‘hints and guesses’ of a reality that is both larger and more significant than our own.

This thesis explores representations of wild nature in two Arthurian texts – one British and one American – produced in an age characterised by rapid social transformation: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-1885) and Howard Pyle’s Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903). By investigation of the textual descriptions of wilderness and the portrayals of characters living there, the study aims to investigate what attitudes towards unkempt nature are displayed in the two texts. While both narratives give evidence of a powerful nostalgia for a vanishing paradise, the yearning for Eden is expressed quite differently. Pyle’s text fuses the concepts of wilderness and paradise together by depicting the unkempt landscape as a place of splendour and spiritual enjoyment. Such a celebration of nature might well be seen a reaction against the rapid loss of wild spaces across America (and Britain) during the life-time of the author. In the Idylls, paradise is represented in the domesticated yet green landscape of the faraway fairy island of Avilion. Wilderness, on the other hand, is depicted as a harmful disease progressively spreading across the realm, arguably bringing about a moral degeneration among the human characters. In the end, however, it is not wilderness, but the corruption of the supposedly civilised characters that causes the collapse of Arthur’s empire. On closer inspection, the real danger thus seems to come from culture and material conditions rather than from nature.

"Image and Text" focuses on the consequences of multi-media interaction on the concept of a work's meaning(s) in three distinct publishing trends in nineteenth-century Britain: graphic satire, the literary annuals, and book illustration. The graphic satire of engravers James Gillray and George Cruikshank is replete with textual components that rely on the interaction of media for the overall satirical impact. Literary annuals combine engravings with the ekphrastic poetry of writers including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Book illustrations provided writers Sir Walter Scott and Alfred, Lord Tennyson a means to recycle previously published works as "new" texts; the engravings promote an illusion of textual originality and reality by imparting visual meanings onto the text. In turn, the close proximity of text to image changes visual meanings by making the images susceptible to textual meanings. Many of the theoretical implications resulting from the pairing of media resound in modern film adaptations, which often provide commentary about nineteenth-century visual culture and the self-reflexivity of media. The critical heritage that has responded to the pairing of media in nineteenth-century print culture often expresses uneasiness with the relationship between text and mechanically produced images, and this uneasiness has often resulted in the treatment of text and image as separate components of multi-media works. "Image and Text" recovers the dialogue between media in nineteenth-century print forms often overlooked in critical commentary that favors the study of an elusive and sometimes fictional concept of an original work; each chapter acknowledges the collaborative nature of the production of multi-media works and their ability to promote textual newness, originality (or the illusion of originality), and (un)reality. Multi-media works challenge critical conventions regarding artistic and authorial originality, and they enter into battles over fidelity of meaning. By recognizing multi-media works as part of a diverse genre it becomes possible to expand critical dialogue about such works past fidelity studies. Text and image cannot faithfully represent the other; what they can do is engage in dialogue: with each other, with their historical and cultural moments, and with their successors and predecessors.

This thesis analyses the figure of Arthur, in a period spanning the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, when that figure became increasingly protean and multifaceted, and the audience for the Arthurian legend grew in both size and variety. It argues that many authors wrote through Arthur, as well as about Arthur, using the figure to understand and test their own ideas about ideals (e.g. of manliness, kingship, or heroism) as well as problems (such as war, despotism, or ungodliness). This thesis analyses Arthur by considering him as a 'type', using a definition of the term that highlights a paradox: a type, in a scientific sense, is both perfect (an exemplary model) and normal (common enough to be representative). When applied to Arthur, it means that he is both a perfect, or near perfect, example, but is also to some extent a 'normal' human being. Different authors analysed in this thesis emphasise different aspects of the figure, according to whether they focus on Arthur's perfection or his normality. Other meanings of the word 'type' are also applied when relevant: the idea is not to force all versions of Arthur into a single or definitive category, but to retain the complexity of how Arthur is characterised and written about in texts. The ultimate aim of this thesis is to put the figure of Arthur into critical focus, and explain why he has been returned to so often in history.