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\"By 1850, Alfred Tennyson was not merely the Poet Laureate, a commercially successful and critically acclaimed author, he was one of Britain's leading celebrities. Offering new analysis of the workings of Victorian celebrity, this volume explores the ever-expanding compass of Tennyson's fame and the efforts of the poet and others to control this phenomenon. It shows that Tennyson's retreat from mainland publicity to the secluded Isle of Wight and his limiting of his social circle to that of family and like-minded guests, only increased the demand of fans and tourists for access to the poet. Through an analysis of poetry, paintings, photography, illustrations, memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, letters, and newspaper and periodical articles, this book shows that Tennyson's fashioning of his reluctant celebrity affected not only his own life and works, but also had an effect on his celebrity and non-celebrity friends, and on the (self-)construction of his fans. \"-- Provided by publisher.

The idea of the mother tongue is a current of thought that establishes monolingualism as a condition of true language. Developed in relation to pre-national German territories, the idea also had repercussions for debates about the linguistic identity of mid-Victorian Britain that were drawn out in the periodical press. This article examines how the journals Household Words (1850–59) and All the Year Round (1859–95), edited by Charles Dickens until 1870, align themselves with Johann Gottfried Herder’s view that only a native speaker can master a language. Focusing on a corpus known as “the language articles,” this essay considers how Dickens’s contributors worked towards implementing a prestige language as the national language, all the while disbelieving the possibility of such an enterprise.

The reign of William IV represents a period concerned with questions of national identity, not only in a national context, but also in a global one. Periodicals of the time, such as the Athenaeum, present the coexistence of two related, but inherently opposite, conceptions of literature and its functions: Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur is contemporaneous with developments in the formation and consolidation of national literatures, which can be observed to coexist even in the early nineteenth century. World literature, as imagined by Goethe, represents a way of circumventing the inward-looking attitude of nationalism, and of prioritizing fluidity and flexibility over stability. National literature, as practised widely during the nineteenth century, represents a way of grounding national genius in literary texts, either by scrutinizing only the works of authors of a specific nationality, or by comparing them in a transnational, intercultural perspective. This article investigates two series of articles published almost concurrently in the Athenaeum: ‘A Biographical and Critical History of the Literature of the last Fifty Years’, by Allan Cunningham in 1833, and ‘Literature of the Nineteenth Century’, by diverse authors between 1834 and 1838. This article highlights the coexistence between different authorial focalizations in historicizing and historiographing literature, demonstrating the malleability, undecidability and arbitrariness of dominant models of national literary identities. I argue that during the 1830s the Athenaeum's outlook is decidedly cosmopolitan and international as the contributors engage with European literature equally often as they do with British texts. They are also eager to stretch the readers' awareness beyond the European context, embracing the wealth of ideas, styles and perspectives as culturally enriching, but not exotic, erudition.

cette contribution relativise l'éloge du multilinguisme, de l'interculturalité et de la Mischkultur souvent attribués a l'écrivain, feuilletoniste et éditeur luxembourgeois Batty Weber (1860-1940). Cette analyse des premieres années (1913-1920) de son feuilleton Abreisskalender (1913-1940) montre la complexité, les difficultés, autant que les avantages, intellectuels et identitaires, de la condition multilingue, perçus, vécus et transmis par Weber dans le contexte des idées et idéologies courantes de l'époque. Bien qu'ilpréconise la tolérance envers les problemes de prononciation et de style des locuteurs plurilingues, il a tendance a exiger une perfection d'expression de monolingue.

This thesis examines the representations of the self as a cultural agent, both reacting to and actively shaping codes of social and artistic respectability, as displayed in the diaries of the canonical Victorian writers Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It analyses the impact of wider ideological and social imperatives on the diarists’ subjective experience and reads their tendency to silence the self as a symptom of the cultural pressure to merge their private and public persona. These diaries represented a forum in which the diarists perpetually negotiated their own value within the Victorian ideology of productivity and thus not only reflect their inner world but also the cultural climate of the nineteenth century. Chapter One traces the selected diarists’ reluctance to reveal private information, as well as their tendency to foreground professional productivity, to the social pressure to efface emotions relating to the self and to only cultivate those that nurtured the community. It identifies the similarities between the compulsive self-discipline advocated in the psychological discourse of the period, particularly Alexander Bain’s The Emotions and the Will (1859), and the willingness to both live up to and actively shape the cultural codes of respectability that Elizabeth Eastlake and Henry Crabb Robinson display in their diaries. Chapter Two compares and contrasts the desire for maximal professional productivity as exhibited in George Eliot’s and George Gissing’s diaries. Both worked obstinately in order to increase their own value: whereas Eliot sought to redeem her ‘guilt of the privileged,’ Gissing desperately needed to increase his financial solvency through literary output. Chapter Three discusses the ways in which John Ruskin’s diary helped him block out unrespectable and painful private experiences through transforming his obsessive desire to appropriate and “feel” visual experience into a professional task. Chapter Four shows that Gerard Manley Hopkins—because he was acutely concerned by his cultural otherness caused by his homosexuality—not only sought refuge and validation by joining the Jesuits, but by narrowing his realm of experience to nature, merged the private and the public self into the figure of the professional, asexual, dutiful and disinterested observer.