Tennyson (Guide to the Year's Work‪)‬

Two book-length studies of Tennyson appeared in 2008 (the date of all works cited unless otherwise indicated). Substantial portions of two additional books as well as numerous essays--often focused on Tennyson's relation to other writers--made the ante-bicentennial year of Tennyson's birth a significant one. In Tennyson's Name: Identity and Responsibility in the Poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ashgate), Anna Barton adopts cultural, materialist, and formal analysis to assess anonymity and shifting signatures ("Alfred Tennyson," "Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L.; Poet Laureate," "Alfred, Lord Tennyson") throughout Tennyson's career. Barton's point of departure is J. S. Mill's A System of Logic (1843), which asserts that proper names have no inherent meaning (as Saussure later argued of signifiers generally), since parents' hopeful naming of children often comes to naught. While a poet could construct a proper name's connotations, Tennyson faced the challenge of sustaining a name signifying poetic merit in an era of emergent commodity culture and brand names divorced from substance. His poems' content, Barton argues, increasingly reflected his negotiation of names and naming.