Tucker, Herbert F. 1949- (Herbert Frederick Tucker)

PERSONAL:

Born September 6, 1949, in Providence, RI; married, 1970; children: two. Education: Amherst College, B.A., 1971, Yale University, Ph.D., 1977.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, University of Virginia, 219 Bryan Hall, P.O. Box 400121, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121; fax: 434-924-1478. E-mail—tucker@virginia.edu.

CAREER:

Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, assistant professor, 1977-82, associate professor of English, 1982-84; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, associate professor of English 1984-86; University of Virginia, Charlottesville, professor of English, 1986—, John C. Coleman Professor of English, 2003—. Williams College, Scotto Visiting Professor, 2006; also visiting professor at Regent's College, University of London, 1987, and New York University in London, 2002. Member of editorial board, PMLA, 1992-95.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association of America.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Danforth fellow, 1973-77; Whiting fellow, 1976-77; fellow of Modern Language Association of America and American Council of Learned Societies, 1982-83; fellow at Shannon Center for Advanced Studies, 1986-88, 1997; fellow of National Endowment for the Humanities at National Humanities Center, 2000-01; Donald J. Gray Prize, North American Victorian Studies Association, 2004.

WRITINGS:

Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1980.

Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1988.

(Editor) Critical Essays on Alfred Lord Tennyson, G.K. Hall (New York, NY), 1993.

(Editor, with David Sofield) Under Criticism: Essays for William H. Pritchard, Ohio University Press (Athens, OH), 1998.

(Editor) A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 1999.

(Editor, with Dorothy Mermin) Victorian Literature 1830-1900, Harcourt College Publishers (Fort Worth, TX), 2001.

Series editor, "Victorian Literature and Culture," University Press of Virginia, 1989. Contributor to books, including Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature, edited by Lloyd Davis, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1993; Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, edited by Alison Booth, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1993; Romantic/Victorian: Influence and Resistance in Nineteenth Century Poetry, edited by G. Kim Blank and Margot Louis, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1993; Robert Browning in Contexts, edited by John Woolford, Wedgestone Press (Winfield, KS), 1998; and Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Suzy Anger, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 2001. Contributor to professional journals and other periodicals, including PMLA, Australasian Victorian Studies Journal, Modern Language Quarterly, Victorian Studies, Harvard Library Bulletin, Milton Quarterly, Studies in Browning and His Circle, Philological Quarterly, Studies in English Literature, and Victorian Institute Journal. Associate editor, New Literary History, 1996.

SIDELIGHTS:

Herbert F. Tucker's first book Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure discusses "Browning's anticlosural aesthetic in relation to the poet's moral philosophy" which valued the pursuit of a goal more than the achievement of it according to a Choice contributor. Written for upper-division undergraduate students and above, the work of scholarship was called "brilliant" by Clyde de L. Ryals in the Modern Language Review: "It tells us a great deal not only about the young Browning but also about the modern poetic tradition." William H. Pritchard, in the Hudson Review, called the work "the most sophisticated and passionate defense of his [Browning's] procedures as a poet that I'm aware of…. The best praise I can give to Browning's Beginnings is that it challenges the lazy reader like me who thought he had come to an end as far as reading ‘My Last Duchess’ or ‘Andrea del Sarto’ went. Instead, Tucker shows one how they go further and differently than one had thought so there is nothing for it but to pick up Browning and begin again."

Tucker's next work, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, covers Tennyson's poetry through 1855, "the latest in a long line of studies that arrange close readings of more or less self-referential texts in ways that point up Tennyson's passage from private to public, self to society, Romantic to Victorian," according to Kerry McSweeney in Modern Language Review. Critics were mixed in their assessment of this work. Danny Karlin in the London Review of Books observed that Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism is not the "labour of love" that Browning's Beginnings was, calling the work "a tremendous disappointment. It has all the inflated idea of itself that the title suggests." McSweeney, on the other hand, wrote: "Tucker's discussions of particular texts have much to recommend them. I repeatedly found myself surprised by the sustained freshness of the analyses of well-known and much-commented-upon poems."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice, May, 1981, review of Browning's Beginnings: The Art Disclosure, p. 1267.

Hudson Review, autumn, 1981, William H. Pritchard, "Critics on Poets," pp. 413-418.

Kenyon Review, summer, 1989, Miriam Bailin, "The Music of Fatality," pp. 159-162.

London Review of Books, August 31, 1989, Danny Karlin, "Breathing on the British Public," pp. 19-22.

Modern Language Review, January, 1984, Clyde De L. Ryals, review of Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure, pp. 157-159; January, 1990, Kerry McSweeney, review of Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, pp. 152-153.

Victorian Studies, winter, 1995, Gerhard Joseph, "Why Are They Saying Such Bad Things about Victorian Poetry? Recent Tennyson Criticism," pp. 255-264.