The Victorian Poet and His Readers: The Strange Case of Tennysons The Princess

The author follows the interpretative pursuits of nineteenth-century readers and analyses Tennysons The Princess through the prism of their critical ideas. She analyses Tennysons reconsideration of gender binaries and womens rights as well as the poems reliance on the aesthetics of the grotesque and its metapoetic games. The book rests on the premise that literature cannot be studied in isolation from its immediate socio-historical context. As such, poetry becomes an outcome of social and cultural negotiations, moving in a strange diagonal between the author and his public.