Tennyson's Fixations: Psychoanalysis and the Topics of the Early Poetry

Matthew Rowlinson has given us the most penetrating analysis of Tennyson's poetry to date. He proposes a revitalized and properly analytic formalism as the appropriate model for reading of Tennyson. In a series of original, scrupulously attentive, and sophisticated close readings, he probes the nature of place and the structuring of desire in Tennyson's work. Focusing on the poet's most important early writings- fragments and poems produced from 1824 to 1833- Rowlinson conflates deconstructive theory with psychoanalytic insights.

Matthew Rowlinson is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College.