Nine years ago Herbert Tucker wrote an excellent first book, Browning's Beginnings; like many first books it gave the impression of being a labour of love. Tucker's second is a tremendous disappointment. It has all the inflated idea of itself that the title suggests. Browning's Beginnings was short, keen and suggestive. It used Post-Structuralist approaches with verve and point. It was, in nothing but the good sense of the word, a modest book. Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism is not short, neither is it modest. It is the Big Book which American academics must 'produce'. The brilliant close readings which distinguished the earlier book can still be found, but their context has altered: they emerge against the grain of the argument, not as part of it. Exit Young Tucker, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota; enter Tucker Senior, full Professor at the University of Virginia. And Tucker is robed in professorial garb from head to footnotes.

LRB 31 August 1989 | PDF Download