| Summary: | This dissertation explores the role played by the dramatic monologue in certain Victorian articulations of the concepts of culture and civilization. My first chapter investigates the ambition of Tennysons monologuists (St. Simeon Stylites, Ulysses, Tithonus, and Tiresias) to attain centrality, and even a iconic stature, within civilizations they appear simultaneously to reject. The second Tennyson chapter concentrates on Maud: A Monodrama, a politically tendentious work that, in part through readers misapprehension of the genre, came to contribute to a prevailing critical perception of Tennysons poetry as a highly wrought artifact of no social or political consequence. My third chapter explores the complex interrelation in Brownings Renaissance monologues (My Last Duchess, The Bishop Orders his Tomb, and Fra Lippo Lippi) between aesthetics, criminality, and high culture. The final chapter examines the critical topos of Brownings obscurity, with reference to those monologuists who appear to withdraw from the hierarchies of critical assessment. Each of these chapters tracks the social and literary formation of Tennyson and Browning, linking the phenomenon of their popularity to the poets own formulations, through the dramatic monologue, of cultural icons. The manufacture of Brownings and Tennysons own public and critical personae points to an apparent paradox in the stature of these poets: these authors of dramatic monologues which consistently explore the difficulties of acculturation became themselves representative of the very notion of culture
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