“No one remembers you at all”:
Mick Imlah and Alan Hollinghurst Ventriloquising Tennyson
Keywords:
afterlife, fiction, Mick Imlah, influence, Alan Hollinghurst, neo-Victorian, poetry, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, twenty-first century, VictorianAbstract
Reflecting on recent new critical approaches to the act of ventriloquism in Victorian and neo-Victorian literature, this article will consider writings of Alan Hollinghurst and Mick Imlah, which both attempt, whether directly or indirectly, to ‘ventriloquise’ Tennyson, through allusion but also re-fashioning of the poet’s body in fictional works. Considering their re-appropriations of the Victorian poet’s work and biography, not least in terms of sexuality and the contemporary rethinking of ‘the Victorian’, this article will explore Tennyson’s wider significance in and for the early twenty-first century.
