Stefanie Markovits
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198718864
- eISBN:
- 9780191788314
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198718864.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Poetry
This book considers the rise of a hybrid generic form, the verse-novel, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such poems combined epic length with novelistic plots in the attempt to capture ...
More
This book considers the rise of a hybrid generic form, the verse-novel, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such poems combined epic length with novelistic plots in the attempt to capture not a heroic past but the quotidian present. Victorian verse-novels also tended to be rough-mixed, their narrative sections interspersed with shorter, lyrical verses in varied measures. In flouting the rules of contemporary genre theory, which saw poetry as the purview of the eternal and ideal and relegated the everyday to the domain of novelistic prose, verse-novels proved well suited to upsetting other hierarchies, as well, including those of gender and class. The genre’s radical energies often emerge from the competition between lyric and narrative drives, between the desire for transcendence and the quest to find meaning in what happens next; the unusual marriage plots that structure such poems prove crucibles of these rival forces. Generic tensions also yield complex attitudes toward time and space: the book’s first half considers the temporality of love, while its second looks at generic geography through the engagement of novels in verse with Europe and the form’s transatlantic travels. Both well-known verse-novels (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House) and lesser-known examples are read closely alongside a few nearly related works (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book). An Afterword traces the verse-novel’s substantial influence on the modernist novel.Less
This book considers the rise of a hybrid generic form, the verse-novel, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such poems combined epic length with novelistic plots in the attempt to capture not a heroic past but the quotidian present. Victorian verse-novels also tended to be rough-mixed, their narrative sections interspersed with shorter, lyrical verses in varied measures. In flouting the rules of contemporary genre theory, which saw poetry as the purview of the eternal and ideal and relegated the everyday to the domain of novelistic prose, verse-novels proved well suited to upsetting other hierarchies, as well, including those of gender and class. The genre’s radical energies often emerge from the competition between lyric and narrative drives, between the desire for transcendence and the quest to find meaning in what happens next; the unusual marriage plots that structure such poems prove crucibles of these rival forces. Generic tensions also yield complex attitudes toward time and space: the book’s first half considers the temporality of love, while its second looks at generic geography through the engagement of novels in verse with Europe and the form’s transatlantic travels. Both well-known verse-novels (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House) and lesser-known examples are read closely alongside a few nearly related works (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book). An Afterword traces the verse-novel’s substantial influence on the modernist novel.
Stefanie Markovits
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198718864
- eISBN:
- 9780191788314
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198718864.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Poetry
“Introduction: A Short History of a Long Form” introduces the verse-novel by describing its major features—including its contemporaneity (in contrast to epic), its storytelling impulse, its frequent ...
More
“Introduction: A Short History of a Long Form” introduces the verse-novel by describing its major features—including its contemporaneity (in contrast to epic), its storytelling impulse, its frequent use of interpolated lyric verses (“rough-mixing”), and its preference for common language—against the backdrop of Victorian genre theory and recent accounts of the period’s poetic genres. Focusing on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, an early and influential example of the form, the Introduction suggests how Victorian writers self-consciously used the generic indeterminacy of the verse-novel to contest social as well as literary norms and express a broad range of cultural concerns. It also traces some of the prior hybrid experiments that influenced the rise of the verse-novel at mid-century and offers a preview of the chapters to come.Less
“Introduction: A Short History of a Long Form” introduces the verse-novel by describing its major features—including its contemporaneity (in contrast to epic), its storytelling impulse, its frequent use of interpolated lyric verses (“rough-mixing”), and its preference for common language—against the backdrop of Victorian genre theory and recent accounts of the period’s poetic genres. Focusing on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, an early and influential example of the form, the Introduction suggests how Victorian writers self-consciously used the generic indeterminacy of the verse-novel to contest social as well as literary norms and express a broad range of cultural concerns. It also traces some of the prior hybrid experiments that influenced the rise of the verse-novel at mid-century and offers a preview of the chapters to come.
