Verse novel research and reception in the twenty-first-century
Abstract
The verse novel is often deemed problematic by scholars and reviewers alike. Scholarly
research that scrutinises the preconceptions toward this poetic narrative form, or its perceived
attendant difficulties, is by contrast, scant. Given the paucity of verse novel research, the
question to be asked in this paper is: Are preconceived ideas of the verse novel impeding
critical research of the form, and if so, how might future research redress the impact on verse
novel reception? Drawing on an earlier review of literature, this paper argues that several
interrelated factors complicate, marginalise or problematise the verse novel’s status. It
identifies and appraises how past and present reading practices; taxonomic classifications; the
relation between the verse novel and its novelistic counterpart; and the conflation of lyric and
poetry as terms, impact on verse novel research and reception. Some recuperative acts are
proposed for the direction of future research by which scholars can close the gaps in verse
novel research, and critics and readers can better regard the verse novel form.
Bio
Linda Weste holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Melbourne University. She writes poetry
and verse novels; co-ordinates the online narratology network for Australia and the Asia
Pacific, narrAus, and is current Reviews Editor for the bi-annual online AAWP journal,
TEXT.
Introduction
In the twenty-first-century, forty-two years after a dissertation with the title, The
Verse-Novel: Bastard Child of the Nineteenth Century1 entered the scholarly domain, the
verse novel still faces a problematic reception. Michael Symmons Roberts, in discussing the
verse novel form, positions it as, ‘the awkward child of successful parents, destined to
disappoint both of them (1).’ Even Kroll, who recognises the verse novel’s research potential,
utilises the metaphor, ‘a marriage made in heaven or hell between incompatible partners’2 to
communicate the subject’s troubled status (2). How did these preconceived notions come to
predominate, given verse novel research is scant?
Since the verse novel’s early stages of development, writers have conjectured about its
scope and structural features. Writers of the verse novel between the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries varied in their regard for which particular poetic and narrative elements
were desirable to include or to emphasise. This is evident in the differential terms they chose
for the form: ‘novel in verse’ (Emily Bronte), ‘poetical novel’ (Anna Seward), ‘novel-poem’
(Robert Browning), ‘domestic novel in verse’ (Bulwer-Lytton) or simply, ‘poem’ (Coventry
Patmore) (Bose 235).
Writers of the verse novel in the Victorian era commonly held three expectations of
the form: that it have a story (Elizabeth Barrett, qtd. in Bose 13); that it have an approach to
the treatment of convention, whether that be ‘flinching at nothing of the conventional’
(Elizabeth Barrett, qtd. in Bose 13) or offering ‘a certain variety of style’ (Bulwer-Lytton, qtd.
1
in Bose 10), and that it be about modern life, that is, to ‘have for its subject matter the
manners and habits of the time in which it is composed’ (Bulwer Lytton qtd. in Bose 10).
The context for these writers’ ideological preference for contemporaneity of subject
matter lies is the Victorians’ ‘faith in the inspiring age of Progress in which they lived’ (Bose
14). Their didactic view of poetry as comprehending the social fabric and indeed, as
inseparable from it, mirrors literary theory of the time, in particular Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A
Defence of Poetry (1821). Yet poetry, in Shelley’s estimation, could not be subservient to
tragedy, to portraying the decay of social life: ‘[P]oetry acts to produce the moral
improvement of man [by] lift[ing] the veil from the hidden beauty of the world (34). Shelley
too, valued particular poetic constituents, namely: a structure of versification of the poet’s
choosing, for ‘every great poet must inevitably innovate’ (32); ‘a certain uniform and
harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry’ (31); and vitally
metaphorical language (30).
In the search for antecedent discourses that might shed some light on the verse novel’s
troubled status, it is apparent that although writers of the Victorian era held definite
preferences in regard to their own work, none, with the exception perhaps of A.H. Clough
who also wrote criticism, had a sphere of influence extending beyond their literary circle.
A survey of critical literature might therefore begin with the handful of academic
responses, all with a focus on the Victorian era, that emerge during the period 1940 to 1975.3
The considerable focus on the Victorian era in these dissertations is, of course, contexualised
by broader literary developments, which saw the novel emerge ‘as a new literary genre in the
eighteenth century, … [owing] much to traditions and works, literary and non-literary, from
earlier times’ (Hawthorn 9), and in particular, profoundly influenced by works such as
Rabelais’s Pantagruel and Gargantua (1532 and 1534) and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don
Quixote (1605-15).
Of the literature, one source in particular resonates with the polemical discourse that
can characterise verse novel research and reception today. In The Early Victorian Verse
Novel, Bose determines the ‘success’ of a sample of Victorian verse novels from the period
1830 to 1860. His analysis of length, scope, theme and technique results in a short list of
books that ‘may be properly called verse novels’ (23). Bose’s praise of the verse novel as one
of the ‘most notable contributions of Victorian poets to the form of poetry’ (5) is not without
qualification, since his criticism is pronounced in comments such as: a negligable specimen’
(17); ‘singularly lacking in poetical quality’ (25-26); ‘[d]evoid of any plot, character-interest
or intellectual content’ (26); ‘scanty evidence of poetic power’ (17); ‘a plot that is too slender
for a novel’ (27); and ‘weak in incidents and emotional appeal... a feeble performance as a
novel and feebler still as poetry’ (28). Indeed, the extent of criticism that Bose levels at the
form contrasts markedly with his declaration that ‘the neglect of the verse-novel is difficult to
account for ...’ (5) and in his plea for its value to be recognized (5).
The present article appraises the critique of Bose, and other scholars, with the purpose
of evaluating the impact of critical reception, along with other factors, on verse novel
research. It addresses the central question: Are preconceived ideas of the verse novel
impeding critical research of the form, and if so, how might future research redress the impact
on verse novel reception? Drawing from an earlier survey of literature,4 I argue that these
factors complicate, marginalise or problematise the verse novel’s status. What follows is an
appraisal of how past and present reading practices; taxonomic classifications; the relation
between the verse novel and its novelistic counterpart; and the conflation of lyric and poetry
as terms, impact on verse novel research and reception. The article also proposes approaches
for the direction of future research by which scholars can close the gaps in verse novel
research, and critics and readers can better regard the verse novel form.
2
A paradigmatic problem
If the verse novel is to be considered germane for literary or narrative research, then,
first and foremost, the way forward for the verse novel will arguably require researchers to
actively contest the ‘double-trouble’ paradigm. In existing research this paradigm attributes
inherent problems, flaws or constraints to the double dynamic of the verse novel form.
Williams, for instance, acknowledges on the one hand that the verse novel arose ‘alongside
the novel proper’ yet by stating on the other hand, that the verse novel ‘yokes together two
forms of writing’ and ‘do[es] not invest fully [in either]’ she readily calls into question the
integrity of the verse novel form against supposedly ‘pure’ forms such as the novel or the
poem’ which, ‘proceed as though their status is already settled’ (121). Williams’ disclaimer:
‘which is not to suggest that they are ‘failed novels’ or ‘failed poems’’ (121) cannot revoke
the privileging implied within her critique.
Privileging of this sort may be representative of the tendency of literary studies, noted
by Dubrow, ‘to project its own competitive hierarchies onto a number of literary arenas’
(261). Analyses need not focus on the perceived deficits arising from poetic narratives’
‘double design’5 as research by scholars including Kinney; Dubrow; and Morgan
demonstrates. Kinney’s study of narrative poems written before the novel was recognised as a
genre (4), finds that poetic elements ‘do not necessarily subordinate themselves to the onward
drive of narrative’ (6), even when bound by the prosodic and stanzaic structures of the text;
thus ‘the poetic form does not so much prevent as modify the production of narrative’ (10).
Theorists also tend to generalise a conflictual relationship between lyric and narrative,
according to Dubrow (261). By contrast, she points out, there are instances where ‘rather than
blocking narrative, lyric often enables it’ (261) that is, where ‘lyric can intensify and in doing
so instigate narrative’ (263). Dubrow’s research shows how lyric may lead to narrative and to
action’ (263) and how ‘lyric transcendence can also be the end product of narratives’ (264),
that is, ‘the culmination of narrative in lyric’ (264). Morgan further exemplifies the
productive tension between poetic and narrative elements: her analysis demonstrates how the
narrative techniques of nineteenth-century long poems can achieve lyric ends (200-1).
Dubrow believes theorists should ‘challenge the expectation that a conflictual relationship
between (lyric and narrative) … is normative even virtually inevitable’ (263). She argues that
theorists should devote more attention to the frequency and variety of their cooperative
interactions’ (264).
Taxonomy and terminology
The way forward for verse novel research will also require more substantial
articulations of the verse novel as a genre. This is not to summarily dismiss a tradition of
reflecting on poetic narratives that has provided invaluable precedent. The literature, however,
does draw attention to the discontinuities of comment pertaining to the verse novel’s status as
a genre, and its place within a generic taxonomy.
Frow refers to the verse novel as a ‘provisional genre’ (1).6 The term acknowledges
the tentative or limited ‘degree to which audiences recognise the formal criteria of a genre’
(Puschmann, 51). According to Puschmann, when the criteria of a genre are readily
recognised, users of the genre can exploit, manipulate, or abuse the genre, and this
demonstrates its salience (51).
If a measure of genre salience is parody, satire, or subversion, then, according to
several scholars, the verse novel as a genre already has salience. Felluga, for instance, claims
that ‘the form had achieved enough cohesion and visibility to be parodied in Edmund C.
Nugent’s Anderleigh Hall: A Novel in Verse (1866)’ (171). He refers to this act of parody as
‘a sure sign of a genre’s ossification and imminent obsolescence’ (171). Sauerberg, too,
3
claims that ‘conventionally lyrical elements are contingent and/or parodic’ (446) in the latetwentieth-century verse novel. This is consistent with what Abad-Garcia terms the
‘simultaneous respect for and subversion of the universal generic’ (266) that is foreground in
postmodern texts.
In The Verse Novel: A Modern American Poetic Genre, Murphy appeals for critical
conceptions of the verse novel to ‘remain conditional, relative and developing’ (69). His
earlier, 1986 dissertation claims that verse novels are as dynamic and protean as their prose
counterparts (335). Arguably then it shares the novel’s continuing capacity, noted by
Richardson, to be ‘dialectical in its perpetual reconfiguring of adjacent genres’ (140).
Addison, by contrast, attempts to definitively locate the verse novel within a generic
taxonomy, before concluding, ‘however else we classify them ... ‘long narrative poem’ is their
definitive, and adequate, taxonomy’ (544). Felluga attests to the heterogeneity of the verse
novel. He acknowledges that it ‘engages, overlaps or appropriates other poetic subgenres,
including the sonnet sequence (George Meredith’s sixteen-line version of the form in Modern
Love), the dramatic monologue (Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book) and the epic
romance (Alfred Lord Tennysons’s Idylls of the King)’ (172).
Felluga’s claim that ‘it was not until the 1850s and 1860s that the ‘verse novel’ really
came into its own as a distinct hybrid between two arch-generic forms that had, until this
point, been considered as irreconcilable and even antagonistic’ (172) overlooks the evidence
that antecedents of the verse novel do not convey a single, uniform discourse. Some early
Victorian verse novels incorporate songs and diaries. The fourteen parts of William Bell
Scott’s poem Rosabell (1838; later published as Maryanne in 1854) utilise song sections
(Bose 19). Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) comprising nine books and
written in blank verse, additionally utilises journals and monologues. Bose acknowledges that
the inclusion of ‘lyrics and songs, letters, journals and monologues … testify to the variety of
technique employed in [the] Early Victorian verse novel’ (37).
Appreciably, the range of opinion on the verse novel’s generic status may reflect the
distinguishable differences between the instrumental role of genre and the dynamic role of
genre. That is, whether identifying the genre to which a text ‘belongs’ is instrumental, to
establish where to place verse novel on the shelves, or whether genre is viewed as a mutable
and dynamic discourse. A discussion of verse novels might rather, discuss the expressive and
conceptual qualities in a verse novel’s presentation: their ‘modes’: used here ‘in the adjectival
sense’ and defined by Frow in Genre as ‘the thematic and tonal ‘colouring’ of genre’ (67).
Modes are distinguishable from the genres participated in by a work (65). Mode is understood
as the ‘tone’ of a given work, hence it ‘cannot have a hierarchical relationship with genre, it is
rather the means by which it is presented’ (65). Rather than constituting their own categories
or kinds, ‘modes are usually qualifications or modifications of particular genres (gothic
thriller, pastoral elegy, satirical sitcom) ... they specify thematic features and certain forms
and modalities of speech, but not the formal structures or even the semiotic medium through
which the text is to be realised’ (65).
Historically it has been common in fictional literature, according to Fowler in Kinds of
Literature, ‘for several representational modes to combine or alternate or mix within a single
work’ (236). He cites as examples ‘epistolary and therefore quasi-dramatic novels; novels
with passages in purely dramatic form; choral parabases in Greek Tragedy (where the chorus
came forward to address the audience directly in a speech); French tragedies with narrative
exposition, dramatic action and lyric conclusion; and so forth (236-7).’ Modes thus pertain to
ways that a discourse is organised.
A nuanced and flexible approach may better appraise the diversity of presentation
evident in twenty-first century verse novels such as Whylah Falls,7 which incorporates lyric,
epistolary, expository and dramatic modes, sectioned as it is into eight cantos, and
4
incorporating letters ballads, lyric poems, sermons, a newspaper article photographs, songs
and a stage script.
Frow’s term ‘performances of genre’ additionally offers a flexible means to convey
how verse novels perform genre, and in the process of doing so bring to bear the lyric’s
generic norm.8 Addison briefly considers how a Derridean understanding of genre might
apply to the verse novel form — whereby it is seen as ‘participating ... in the novel genre as
well as in a poetic genre’ (555) — and this is constructive, if somewhat at odds with her
cautioning against verse novel and novel conflation (544). For, as Derrida makes clear,
‘participating in’, is not the same as ‘belonging to’ a genre (232).
On Hybridity
Future verse novel research might also develop clear, consistent usage of the term
‘hybrid’. In scholarly critique and reviews of the verse novel alike, the term describes the
verse novel form. This practice shows resilience in the literature over several decades. Bose
first applies the term to the verse novel. There is general acceptance that the verse novel does
not ‘derive from’, but rather, arose around the same time as the novel, and ‘hybrid’ most
commonly refers to the combining of types of poetry with the novel. Addison, for instance,
proposes: ‘it becomes possible to claim the hybrid generic label ‘verse novel’ for a group of
texts which ... may exist in two places simultaneously, in subgenres of the novel and of the
narrative poem’ (555).
Within a larger discourse of genre approaches that comprise three broad schools,9 the
term ‘hybrid’ assumes resemblances to and differences from prototypes. What scholars might
elaborate on, are the affordances and constraints that arise for verse novels when they adopt
conventions from adjacent genres, or from sub-genres. Frow in Genre maintains that it is
constructive to view ‘textuality as an effect of structure which in turn transforms it’ (143).
A further complication is that narratologists apply the term ‘hybrid’ if a given text
demonstrably unites lyric and narrative. This understanding of hybridity is explicit in
transgeneric narratological studies of lyric poems by Hühn; and Hühn and Kiefer; as well as
in Phelan’s investigations of lyric-narrative hybridity, which advance a rhetorical definition of
lyric and an understanding of lyric-narrative interaction. These studies investigate narrative’s
interaction with lyric, rather than with poetic elements per se.
This leads to a salient point: Lyric is not a given in the verse novel: poetry is. Lyric
and poetry are not interchangeable terms. McHale, in ‘Beginning to Think’ deems the
conflation of lyric and poetry ‘manifestly incorrect’ (13) and points out that prior to the ‘lyric
transformation’10 of poetic genres in the nineteenth century, the vast majority of poems
arguably were narrative forms (12). Lyric poems and verse novels most obviously differ from
each other in terms of their narrativity. Lyric poems are not considered to have continuous
narrativity, athough as McHale suggests in ‘Narrative in Poetry’, they may have ‘narrative
materials folded into [them]’ or they may exhibit ‘implicit narrative situations’ (357).
Indeed, lyric was readily delineated from broader conceptions of poetry in Early
Victorian verse novels. It is evident in research by Bose that writers such as Elizabeth Barrett,
Bell Scott and Coventry Patmore made the distinction in their work. Patmore, for instance,
sought to emphasise psychology in his verse novels (Bose 21), whereas he would utilise lyric
form in his religious and mystical poetry. Furthermore, the intense emotional register
associated with the lyric was viewed as incompatible with the early verse novel’s emphasis on
contemporaneity and reflecting society in ‘an objective presentation of life’ (Bose 36).
5
Moving from synchronic to diachronic
The diachronic importance of narrative poetry is a given for the many scholars who
point out the primacy of verse narratives in the shift from an oral medium to a written
medium in western literary tradition, long before prose narratives became an institutionalised
genre. A diachronic approach would benefit future verse novel research by treating the form
as historically variable and examining it in contexts over time. There is a need to trace out-ofprint verse novels from the first half of the twentieth century. Verse novels written between
the two world wars have received inadequate critical attention and thus present an obvious
starting point. Establishing the continuous lineage of verse novels throughout the twentieth
century will contest the view held by Felluga, that the verse novel form died out after 1870
(171). Even if twentieth century verse novels exemplify, as McHale in ‘Narrative in Poetry’
claims, one of the ways ‘continuous narrative survived [modernist poetics] in maginalized and
obsolescent forms’ (357), nevertheless the form emerges dynamic and mutable.
In a diachronic approach, a further scholarly imperative would be to supplement the
considerable focus on early-Victorian antecedents of the form, with a focus on earlier,
eighteenth century examples. The neglect of this period overlooks Anna Seward’s Louisa: A
Poetical Novel in Four Epistles (1784), which precedes the Victorian era by a clear halfcentury. Louisa reached its fifth edition by 1792, and was thus, far from marginal, sharing
popularity in its day with other epistolary novels such as Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and
Clarissa Harlowe (1747, 1748); Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771);
Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloise (1761); and Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782).
Nuancing understandings
To extend insights about verse novel narration, scholars might draw from the rich
theoretical ground that narrative research can offer. Analyses of verse novels tend to rely on
distinctions of tense and grammatical person which, Abbott points out, are associated with
‘early classifications of kinds of narration … which persist in popular usage … but which in
analytic usage have been widely found to be inadequate’ (340). Verse novels have been
variously referred to as: first person narratives, ‘a modern means of rendering soliloquy or
dramatic monologue’ (Alexander 270); dramatic monologues (Lucas and McCreddon 1996);
first person monologues, and third person narratives (Pollnitz 2004).
Identifying the narrative situation of a given verse novel is less fraught using the
typologies formulated by Genette; Stanzel; and Cohn, which allow the understanding that first
or third person narration refers to the position of the narrator, and not the pronoun being used
(Richardson 15). Cohn’s typologies in The Distinction of Fiction usefully differentiate
between types of first-person narration. To clarify the misrepresentation of the verse novel as
a monologue form: clearly, ‘from start to finish’ verse novels do not maintain the ‘consistent
impression of an unrolling mental quotation’ (Cohn 103), and the eventfulness evident in their
poems rules out a non-narrative interior monologue.
Another definitional problem arises when differentiating long poems from verse
novels. Addison maintains that ‘verse novels are all long narrative poems, however else we
classify them ... ‘long narrative poem’ is their definitive, and adequate, taxonomy’ (544).
Sauerberg uses the criterion of length to differentiate a host of verse novels from their long
poem relatives. Long-but-not-long-enough verse novels are re-visioned as modernist long
poems [a classification that Anne Carson perhaps anticipated and tried to circumvent with her
title Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse]. Such long poems, according to Sauerberg, do
not qualify as verse novels:
6
‘[It] is true that long poems with narrative elements have appeared during the
twentieth century, but virtually all of these have lacked the combination of narrative
drive and the consolidation of an everyday fictional universe that we associate with
the low mimetic in the form of the novel.’ (442-443)
The verse novel is perhaps best understood as a type of continuous narrative, the
category which, according to McHale, in ‘Narrative in Poetry,’ it shares with epic; narrative
autobiography in verse; Medieval and Renaissance verse romances; mock epic poems; and
ballads and their literary counterparts (356). A high degree of narrativity is implicit to this
category, on the grounds that ‘(most) if not all of the ‘classic’ issues of narratology arise in
these poems’ (357). Accordingly, verse novels can be understood to share the fundamental
constituents of narrativity found within novels – a storyworld and a temporal sequence of
incidents (in connection with existents) mediated from particular perspectives, and through
acts of utterance or articulation.
Verse versus prose
To conflate the verse novel with its prose counterpart would, however, overlook the
obvious difference: that unlike the novel, the verse novel is mediated through a verse mode of
discourse, not prose. Verse novels provide an opportunity to understand how their chosen
poetic form yields particular affordances for conveying discourse. Given the relationship of
poetic and narrative strategies in each verse novel is unique, notions of how verse novels
achieve stylistic tension could be less circumscribed. Earlier research by the author found
analyses of verse novels tend to subsume poetic elements and typically afford less attention to
poetic and narrative interplay. Scholars therefore need to ensure a focus on poetic elements in
future verse novel research.
The privileging of narrative genres over poetic genres acknowledged in narrative
research (Kinney 1; McHale ‘Narrative in Poetry’ 356; ‘Beginning to Think’ 12) likely
affords some context for the diminution of poetry in verse novel analysis. In Strategies of
Poetic Narrative, Kinney confronts narratology’s neglect of poetic narratives, pointing out
that investigations of poetic narratives tend to overlook or minimise analysis of poetic
elements (3). Kinney also challenges the tendency of researchers to study poetic effects
separately to narrative effects (2). She highlights the distinctiveness of the constitutive and
inherent doubleness of poetic narratives — that they are simultaneously both poems and
narratives — and suggests that analyses should not lose sight of the poetic constituents of the
form. Kinney maintains that a poetic narrative ‘is prone to be treated as ontologically
indistinguishable from a prose narrative’(3). McHale observes in ‘Beginning to Think’ that
‘even the indispensable poems, the ones that narrative theory seems unable to do without,
tend to be treated as de facto prose fictions; the poetry drops out of the equation’ (11-12).
‘Homer is a particularly favored ‘honorary novelist’ for narrative theorists’ according to
Kinney (3).
Horizons of expectation
Another factor impacting on verse novel research and reception is the gap between the
‘horizons of expectations’11 of readers of verse novels, and each verse novel’s aesthetic
characteristics. Much scholarly verse novel research is weighted in favour of mimetic works
and approaches. Certainly in many verse novels, the projected story-world, its existents, and
7
the discourse of the narrative all closely correlate with mimetic, real–world representation.
‘The referential universe of the late-twentieth-century verse novel is decidedly low-mimetic’
according to Sauerberg (446).
Notwithstanding the verisimiltude associated with many verse novels, the rich and
multifaceted platforms of discourse in twenty-first century verse novels demonstrate that
narrators in verse novels can be permeable, or anti-representational; they can achieve
polyphony through variable narration; they can utter the unutterable, and even de-narrate, and
in doing so, resist monologic or mimetic representations of their discourse. Whylah Falls,12
for instance, avoids a ‘naturalistic’ account of dying-in-the-first-person by deploying
metaphors that are incongruous with embodied experience. This manipulates the spatial
representation of the subjectivity of the narrator in the unfolding of the event of death.
Another example is Othello Clemence’s retrospective-first-person-testimony from beyond
death, which transgresses all convention: it reconstructs the narrative, denarrates, signals the
unreliability of the narrator and contests mimetic consciousness. This demonstrates a final
point: the importance of contesting conceptions of the verse novel as always ‘natural’,
‘conventional’ and ‘mimetic’.
Conclusion
Addressing the barriers to verse novel research presents an important, but as yet
unaccomplished task for Literary Studies and Narrative Theory. This article throughout has
tried to outline some factors that currently impede critical understanding of the form, and their
impact on verse novel reception, and to signpost possible directions for future research. By
means of illustration, these factors prompt us to ask: what is at stake in not addressing the
verse novel’s prevailing research gap? This paper’s key points were: to actively contest the
‘double-trouble paradigm’; to provide more extensive theorising of the verse novel as a genre,
and substantiate its claim to hybridity; to distinguish between lyricality and poeticity in the
verse novel; to utilise a diachronic approach; to ensure a focus on poetic elements in verse
novel research; and to contest conceptions of the verse novel as always ‘mimetic’.
Brian McHale’s recent choice of Fredy Neptune as literary exemplar for his critique of
natural narrative13 suggests that scholars may have begun treating the contemporary verse
novel as germane for literary and narrative research, and future scholars might adopt even
more overt measures to shape the way forward for verse novel reception. Better appreciation
of the form. Better understanding of the relation and interaction between its poetic elements
and narrative elements and a contribution to developing notions of poeticity and narrativity.
Researchers could anticipate these mutually beneficial outcomes for both poetry and narrative
research were insights to be brought together across future disciplinary lines.
8
Notes
1.
Magie, Michael. The Verse-Novel: Bastard Child of the Nineteenth Century. Diss.
University of California, 1971.
Kroll maintains ‘At its most challenging, the verse novel is interstitial, a liminal, always
becoming form that does not privilege either poetry or narrative, but rather finds power in a
perpetual give and take between their techniques.’ Nevertheless, Kroll develops her position
metaphorically, by asking whether the verse novel is a marriage made in heaven or hell
between incompatible partners.
2.
Loughran’s 1944 M.A. Thesis entitled The mid-Victorian novel-in-verse; Ronald Clarke’s
1968 M.A. Thesis, The verse-novel: a description of the form, with special attention to
selected verse narratives of the Victorian period, University of Newfoundland, USA;
Raymond Colander’s 1969 doctoral dissertation, The Victorian Verse-Novel. Northwestern
University, Illinois, USA; Michael Magie’s 1971 dissertation, The Verse-Novel: Bastard
Child of the Nineteenth Century, University of California, USA; Jonathan Aaron’s 1974
doctoral dissertation, The Idea of the Novelistic Poem: A Study of four Victorian ‘verse
novels’ by Clough, Tennyson and Browning, Yale University, USA; and Amalendu Bose’s
1974 monograph, The Early Victorian Verse Novel, Punjab University, India.
3.
4. Weste,
2012
5. Kinney’s
6. Frow,
7.
term
2010
Clarke, George Elliott. 2000
8. I
am grateful to John Frow 2010 for this insight
9. See
Hyland, Ken
10. Fowler,
11.
Alistair., A History
Jauss, H-R., 1985; 1982
12. McHale,
Brian., 2012
9
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