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

Publication date:

24 December 2013

Length of book:

280 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

Dimensions:

234x162mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781611484830

Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered beginswith the brute fact that poetry jostledup alongside novels in the bookstallsof eighteenth-century England. Indeed,by exploringunexpected collisions and collusionsbetween poetry and novels, this volumeof exciting, new essays offers a reconsideration of the literary and cultural history of the period. Thenovel 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, ShelleyKing, 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

There is no shortage of scholarship on 18th-century fiction, and criticism of 18th-century verse is not far behind. For the most part, though, these are separate fields of study, and until now only G. Gabrielle Starr's Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century had taken their interaction seriously. Now two junior scholars, Parker and Smith, have brought together an international team of scholars to explore the relationships between the novel and poetry in 18th-century Britain. The contributors range from graduate students to the biggest names in the field, but all have produced learned, incisive, and original investigations into the points of contact between genres. The nine essays (and a chapter-length coda) range from close readings of individual works (Rape of the Lock, Night Thoughts, Pamela, Tristram Shandy) to ambitious attempts to rethink literary history itself. The contributors share no single 'program,' and they often disagree over both methods and conclusions. But they share a commitment to changing the traditional stories of the development of fiction and poetry. This major collection from Bucknell, a leader in 18th-century studies, is required reading for scholars. Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.