Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) has often been considered a particularly British writer in part as his official post as Poet Laureate inevitably committed him to a certain amount of patriotic writing. This volume focuses on his impact on the continent, presenting a major scholarly analysis of Tennyson's wider reception in different areas of Europe. It considers reader and critical responses and explores the effect of his poetry upon his contemporaries and later writers, as well as his influence upon illustrators, painters and musicians. The leading international contributors raise questions of translation and publication and of the choices made for this purpose along with the way in which his ideas and style influenced European writing and culture. Tennyson's reputation in Anglophone countries is now assured, following a decline in the years after his death. This volume enables us to chart the changes in Tennyson's European reputation during the later 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
Elinor Shaffer, FBA, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, has published on Romantic and Victorian literature, is author of 'Kubla Khan' and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School of Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, edited the annual journal Comparative Criticism, and most recently has contributed to Samuel Butler: Victorian Against the Grain.