Novel-Poetry : The Shape of the Real and the Problem of Form

Abstract

Novel-Poetry examines the verse-novel, a hybrid genre that emerged in the middle decades of Britain’s nineteenth century, and makes a larger claim about both the nature of genre and formal structures for time, action, and identity that cross genres. The authors uncover trajectories of literary influence that have gone unseen because of how we have come to understand basic categories—such as lyric and narrative—that structure our approach to literature and affect how we shape our lives, lives which are often constrained by cause-and-effect, 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, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, and George Meredith. The authors turn to the work of philosophers Alain Badiou, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, and Slavoj Žižek to theorize this alternative mode, which they align 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 both 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?