Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered

Contributions by Margaret Doody, David Fairer, Sophie Gee, Heather Keenleyside, Shelley King, Christina Lupton, Natalie Phillips, Aran Ruth, Wolfram Schmidgen, Joshua Swidzinski Edited by Kate Parker, Courtney Weiss Smith

Not available to order

Publication date:

24 December 2013

Length of book:

270 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611484847

Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered begins with the brute fact that poetry jostled up alongside novels in the bookstalls of eighteenth-century England. Indeed, by exploring unexpected collisions and collusions between poetry and novels, this volume of exciting, new essays offers a reconsideration of the literary and cultural history of the period. The novel poached from and featured poetry, and the “modern” subjects and objects privileged by “rise of the novel” scholarship are only one part of a world full of animate things and people with indistinct boundaries.

Contributors: Margaret Doody, David Fairer, Sophie Gee, Heather Keenleyside, Shelley King, Christina Lupton, Kate Parker, Natalie Phillips, Aran Ruth, Wolfram Schmidgen, Joshua Swidzinski, and Courtney Weiss Smith.

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Poetry, Novels, People, Things 1
Courtney Weiss Smith

Part I: Reconsidering Genres: Rising, Borrowing, Circulating

1 Heroic Couplets and Eighteenth-Century Heroism: Pope’s Complicated Characters
Sophie Gee

2 “The Battle Without Killing”: Eliza Haywood and the Politics of Attempted Rape
Kate Parker

3 The Novel’s Poem Envy: Mid-Century Fiction and the “Thing Poem”
Christina Lupton and Aran Ruth

4 “To delineate the human mind in its endless varieties”: Integral Lyric and Characterization in the Tales of Amelia Opie
Shelley King

Part II: Reconsidering Subjects and Objects

5 Undividing the Subject of Literary History: From James Thomson's Poetry to Daniel Defoe's Novels
Wolfram Schmidgen

6 The Rise of the Novel and the Fall of Personification
Heather Keenleyside

7 “Light electric touches”: Sterne, Poetry, and Empirical Erotics
David Fairer

8 “Great labour both of mind and tongue”: Articulacy and Interiority in Young's Night Thoughts and Richardson's Clarissa
Joshua Swidzinski

9 The Art of Attention: Navigating Distraction and Rhythms of Focus in Eighteenth-Century Poetry
Natalie Phillips

Coda: Time, Space, and the Poetic Mind of the Novel
Margaret Doody

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered is a provocative and timely collection well worth the attention of the reader who wishes, as Smith states in her introductory remarks, to ‘grapple with unexpected collisions and collusions between poetry and novels’. . . .[The book] counts among the year’s best books in eighteenth-century studies.