Matthew Rowlinson proposes a revitalized and properly analytic formalism as the appropriate model for a reading of Tennyson. In a series of attentive 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 between 1824 and 1833 - Rowlinson conflates deconstructive theory with psychoanalytic insights. The author begins by observing that the subjectivities articulated in these poems, from the strangely passive poet-seer of the ""Armageddon"" fragments to the embowered singers of ""Mariana,"" ""The Lady of Shalott,"" and ""The Hesperides"" to the absconding monarch of ""Ulysses,"" are all constituted in relation to ruined, abandoned, or inaccessible places. The placing of the subject allegorizes its relation to the signifier as well as to the discursive structures within which the signifier comes into being. On this premise, Rowlinson takes up Lacan's claim that it is through the signifier that it is through the signifier that all human desire is mediated. In the placement of the subjects he reads a distinctively Tennysonian articulation of desire. Following Paul de Man, Rowlinson demonstrates that allegory comes into being only with a structure of repetition. He has developed a formalist poetics that provides a psychoanalytic account of the most basic figurative and formal devices - allegory, metaphor, rhyme, and metre - and he offers an explication and critique of major concepts in Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytic theory, including the gaze, the castration complex, the death drive, and the compulsion to repeat. By returning to the deconstruction, the author has resumed the challenges English studies took up in the 1970s and left incomplete in its rush to historicism. His readings offer fresh insights at the level of theory.

Real Money and Romanticism interprets poetry and fiction by Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Charles Dickens in the context of changes in the British monetary system and in the broader economy during the early nineteenth century. In this period modern systems of paper money and intellectual property became established; Matthew Rowlinson describes the consequent changes in relations between writers and publishers and shows how a new conception of material artifacts as the bearers of abstract value shaped Romantic conceptions of character, material culture, and labor. A fresh and radically different contribution to the growing field of inquiry into the 'economics' of literature, this is an ingenious and challenging reading of Romantic discourse from the point of view of monetary theory and history.

Published in 1850, "In Memoriam" won its author the Poet Laureateship of Britain and received widespread attention from critics and reviewers, as well as ordinary readers. The poem was written in memory of Tennyson's close friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly in 1833; it became a kind of unofficial devotional manual for mourners, including Queen Victoria after the death of Prince Albert. The poem's scope goes beyond individual grief, however, to the development and extinction of species, audaciously exploring history, evolution and God's relationship with humanity. Its formal beauty and emotional resonance make "In Memoriam" as compelling today as it was for nineteenth-century readers. Matthew Rowlinson's introduction traces the poem's composition history and places it in the context of Tennyson's personal and intellectual development. Historical appendices include writings by Arthur Hallam, Victorian fiction on courtship and marriage and materials on natural history and evolution.

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.

Real Money and Romanticism interprets poetry and fiction by Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Charles Dickens in the context of changes in the British monetary system and in the broader economy during the early nineteenth century. In this period modern systems of paper money and intellectual property became established; Matthew Rowlinson describes the consequent changes in relations between writers and publishers and shows how a new conception of material artefacts as the bearers of abstract value shaped Romantic conceptions of character, material culture, and labor. A fresh and radically different contribution to the growing field of inquiry into the 'economics' of literature, this is an ingenious and challenging reading of Romantic discourse from the point of view of monetary theory and history.