KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADESsees the agonistic position of younger writers towards precursors as an
inner psychological struggle," writes Elfenbein, "Bourdieu demystifies it as
the structural result of a competition for symbolic capital." 20
Elfenbein's analysis of influence in "The Lady of Shalott" thus begins in
much the same way as a Bloomian reading would, by locating in Tenny-
son's poem echoes of a Romantic predecessor. Yet, unlike Bloom, he sees
that predecessor not as Shelley or Keats but as Byron. He connects the
"little isle" and "silkensailed" shallops "skimming down" to Camelot in the
1832 version of the poem, with the "little isle" and the boats with "whiter
sails" that "go skimming down" that Byron's imprisoned Bonnivard sees
out the window of his cell in The Prisoner of Chillon (1816). 21 Tennyson,
Elfenbein argues, is replacing Byronic romance, which ends with a mascu-
line hero's rejection of the world, with Tennysonian lyric, which ends (in
the 1832 version) with the Lady's entry into the world where she figures as
the dead author of a lyric poem. But rather than connect this argument to a
personal psychological struggle with Byron as paternal predecessor, in
which Tennyson admires Byron's strength but valiantly attempts to clear a
space in which he can write, Elfenbein examines the early nineteenth-
century culture industry. On the one hand, Byron provides a powerful
model of poetic subjectivity as self-revelation that Tennyson imitates in his
Lady's final "This is I." On the other hand, abandoning Byron is a way of
asserting a value above popularity for literary texts, a way of identifying
with a new high culture whose new form, the pure lyric, announces its
highness through its separation from the everyday. This is a project
embraced by Tennyson's circle, the Cambridge Apostles. By the 1842
version, a more established Tennyson does not need to use Byron to locate
his poetry in the cultural field, and most of the Byronic references are
excised.
Whether we call it tradition, influence, or intertextuality, the relations
between texts and their declarations of their affinities with and differences
from other texts is even more important for us today than it was for the
Victorians, for even more than they, we live in a culture of texts - both
written and visual - that constantly refer to one another. The increasing
intermelding of computers, film, television, visual images, and writing,
together with shifts in the production and marketing of books, and changes
in the education system - all combine to create new literacies and new
cultural forms. Today the challenges posed to the categories of "literature"
and "art" by these technological and social innovations are as pressing as
those challenges that the Victorians experienced. Thinking more about the
complex ways in which Victorians formulated questions about "literature"
and "cultural capital" at a time when these categories were emerging might
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