My love involves the love before : Tennyson\u27s In Memoriam A.H.H., Temporo-Narrative progress, and the Petrarchan lyric sequence tradition

This thesis examines temporo-narrative progress in Tennyson\u27s In Memoriam A.H.H. as a means of situating that work within the Petrarchan lyric sequence tradition, in relation to which it has most often been treated as tangential. In Memoriam A.H.H., I will demonstrate, exhibits a more persistent sense of temporal progress than is typical in other examples of the Petrarchan genre, by virtue of its containing more frequent direct continuities of thought between individual poems than is typical. Such continuities, however, are not in themselves entirely unprecedented in the genre, so that their more persistent presence in Tennyson’s work represents more a stretching than a breaching of generic parameters, and In Memoriam A.H.H. in any case also utilizes other, more conventional methods to contribute to its uniquely strong sense of sequence-wide temporo-narrative progress