This book offers new interpretations of Tennyson's major poems along-side contemporary geology
and specifically Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-3). Employing various approaches -
from close readings of both the poetic and geological texts historical contextualisation and
the application of Bakhtin's concept of dialogism - the book demonstrates not only the
significance of geology for Tennyson's poetry but the vital import of Tennyson's poetics in
explicating the implications of geology for the nineteenth century and beyond. Gender
ideologies in The Princess (1847) are read via High Miller's geology while the writings of
Lyell and other contemporary geologist comparative anatomists and language theorists are
examined along-side In Memoriam (1851) and Maud (1855). The book argues that Tennyson's
experimentation with Lyell's geology produced a remarkable 'uniformitarian' poetics that is
best understood via Bakhtinian theory a poetics that reveals the seminal role methodologies in
geology played in the development of divisions between science and culture and that also
quite profoundly anticipates the crisis in language later associated with the linguistic turn
of the twentieth century.
