The Novelistic Poem and the Poetical Novel: Towards a Theory of Generic Interrelation in the Romantic Period
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Date
2014-08-13
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
This dissertation examines the shifting set of formal and conceptual relations that have structured the intertwined development and reception of “the novel” and “poetry” since the Romantic period. In Part One, I focus on the continuing rise of the novel in the age of best-selling poetry, arguing that narrative poetry and the novel participated in a shared history of narrative innovation. I take the popular and formally innovative poems of Walter Scott as a particularly important example of poetry’s contribution to this shared history. Specifically, I argue that Scott’s knowledge of the ballad tradition and his modern experiments with poetry in that mode enabled him to introduce narrative techniques into the novel that prepare the way for the deployment of free indirect discourse in the novels of Jane Austen and her successors. More broadly, I attempt to describe a theory of generic interrelation that is capable of identifying and explaining the interrelated formal development of works written during the Romantic period.
In Part Two, I work to recover and analyze the complex history of perceptions about genre from the Romantic period through the twentieth century. Since the Romantic period itself, many thinkers have been interested in identifying what is essentially poetic about poetry, and, as a closely related matter, in determining what can distinguish poetry from prose and the novel. But, as narrative poetry has declined in popularity, and as the novel has emerged as the dominant modern genre, the terms of these discussions—and the experiences and expectations of reading that prompt them—have not remained static. The reception of Lord Byron’s Don Juan provides a particularly fascinating example of this gradual change in generic perception. While in the nineteenth century there was a widespread conviction that the poem was too shockingly inappropriate to really qualify as “Poetry”—a poem that was not at all poetic—by the twentieth century critics are praising it for its novelistic features. I trace the long history of Don Juan’s reception as a way of drawing attention to an underappreciated feature of literary history: that perceptions of genres themselves are subject to historical change.
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genre theory, romanticism