Woodman Lecture: Matthew Rowlinson, "Tennyson's Errors"

This paper explores how errors of date, address, and occasion haunt Tennyson’s poetry. Tennyson’s great elegy In Memoriam can be understood as a rectification of error, but even in In Memoriam, some errors and contingencies prove hard to dispel. And they persist in other poems, like the late “In the Valley of Cauteretz,” where a mistake in the year reveals a queer, melancholy ambivalence to the commemorative and anniversary modes as such.

Dr. Matthew Rowlinson: In my teaching and research I study nineteenth-century British literature and culture.I have particular interests in the writings of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, John Keats, and Walter Scott. My work always aims to understand the way literature describes or resists the material, embodied world in which it is made. My most recent book is Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science (Cambridge University Press); current research focuses on literary allegory as a form of anachronism.

The Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism invites intellectual exploration of this movement's powerful legacy to the Humanities and beyond. Romanticism continues to cast a long shadow on our experience, especially our present time of various crises that require Romanticism's ceaseless mental flight more than ever.