Eighteenth-century British literary history was long characterized by two central and seemingly discrete movements—the emergence of the novel and the development of Romantic lyric poetry. In fact, recent scholarship reveals that these genres are inextricably bound: constructions of interiority developed in novels changed ideas about what literature could mean and do, encouraging the new focus on private experience and self-perception developed in lyric poetry. In Lyric Generations, Gabrielle Starr rejects the genealogy of lyric poetry in which Romantic poets are thought to have built solely and directly upon the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. She argues instead that novelists such as Richardson, Haywood, Behn, and others, while drawing upon earlier lyric conventions, ushered in a new language of self-expression and community which profoundly affected the aesthetic goals of lyric poets. Examining the works of Cowper, Smith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats in light of their competitive dialogue with the novel, Starr advances a literary history that considers formal characteristics as products of historical change. In a world increasingly defined by prose, poets adapted the new forms, characters, and moral themes of the novel in order to reinvigorate poetic practice. "Refreshingly, this impressive study of poetic form does not read the eighteenth century as a slow road to Romanticism, but fleshes out the period with surprising and important new detail."—Times Literary Supplement G. Gabrielle Starr is the Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science and a professor of English at New York University. She is the author of Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience.

While poetry has been the genre most closely associated with the Romantic period, the novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has attracted many more readers and students in recent years. Its canon has been widened to include less well known authors alongside Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Love Peacock. Over the last generation, especially, a remarkable range of popular works from the period have been re-discovered and reread intensively. This Companion offers an overview of British fiction written between roughly the mid-1760s and the early 1830s and is an ideal guide to the major authors, historical and cultural contexts, and later critical reception. The contributors to this volume represent the most up-to-date directions in scholarship, charting the ways in which the period's social, political and intellectual redefinitions created new fictional subjects, forms and audiences.

Modern readers can sometimes be unsure about the language and the literary conventions of medieval and Renaissance verse--lyrical works written at a time before poetry was assumed to be about personal expression. This readers' guide introduces to a 21st century audience some of the greatest masterpieces of English poetry spanning five centuries. Focusing on poems by Chaucer, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Milton and others, the author discusses the development of poetic technique, explains the rhetorical culture of earlier centuries and describes the various lyric forms--including lover's complaints, sonnets and elegies--that poets used to communicate with readers.

A history of the writing of mobility in the Romantic period, through the work of major women writers.

How do we know that Emily Dickinson wrote poems? How do we recognize a poem when we see one? In Dickinson's Misery, Virginia Jackson poses fundamental questions about reading habits we have come to take for granted. Because Dickinson's writing remained largely unpublished when she died in 1886, decisions about what it was that Dickinson wrote have been left to the editors, publishers, and critics who have brought Dickinson's work into public view. The familiar letters, notes on advertising fliers, verses on split-open envelopes, and collections of verses on personal stationery tied together with string have become the Dickinson poems celebrated since her death as exemplary lyrics. Jackson makes the larger argument that the century and a half spanning the circulation of Dickinson's work tells the story of a shift in the publication, consumption, and interpretation of lyric poetry. This shift took the form of what this book calls the "lyricization of poetry," a set of print and pedagogical practices that collapsed the variety of poetic genres into lyric as a synonym for poetry. Featuring many new illustrations from Dickinson's manuscripts, this book makes a major contribution to the study of Dickinson and of nineteenth-century American poetry. It maps out the future for new work in historical poetics and lyric theory.

Novel-Poetry examines the verse-novel--a hybrid genre that emerged in the middle decades of Britain's nineteenth century--to make a larger claim about the nature of genre and formal structures for time, action, and identity that cross genres. The volume uncovers trajectories of literary influence that structure our approach to literature and affect how we shape our lives, lives which are often constrained by cause-and-effect and narrative-driven ways of approaching time and possibility. Novel-Poetry tracks an alternative way of thinking about time and event that was inspired by the French Revolution, popularized by Lord Byron, and explored by experimental Victorian poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, and George Meredith. The volume turns to the work of philosophers Alain Badiou, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, and Slavoj %Zi%zek to theorize this alternative mode, which it aligns with the "futur antérieur." The temporality of the future anterior disrupts both the novel's realist chronologies and the expressivist lyric's cult of "the moment," thus liberating possibilities for collective action. Ranging widely across romantic lyric poetry, Victorian novels, and nineteenth-century and contemporary literary theory, Novel-Poetry asks, what alternative structures and temporalities does a focus on either realistic narrative or the lyric moment occlude? Are there ways of thinking about lived experience and personal or collective agency that do not conform to traditional models, ways that the verse-novel might help us to explore? What might be gained today from trying to think about ourselves and our world outside of established frameworks that are now so naturalized as to feel almost inescapable? This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.

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.

Cervantes the Poet travels from the court of Isabel de Valois to Rome, Naples, Palermo, Algiers, and Madrid's barrio de las letras. Recovering Cervantes' nearly forty-year literary career before the publication of Don Quijote, Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer demonstrates the cultural, literary, and theoretical significance of Cervantes' status as a late-sixteenth-century itinerant poet. This study recovers the generative literary milieus and cultural practices of Spain's most famous novelist in order to posit a new theory of the modern novel as an organic transformation of lyric practices native to the late-sixteenth century and Cervantes' own literary outlook.