Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered

Kate Parker is assistant professor of English at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Her article on Sade appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She is writing a book that explores how affective communities impact literary representations of selfhood in eighteenth-century Britain and France. Courtney Weiss Smith is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. She is the author of articles on eighteenth-century literature and culture that have appeared in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation and SEL. Her current book project focuses on relationships between literature, religion and science in early eighteenth-century England.

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.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: Poetry, Novels, People, Things 1Courtney Weiss SmithPart I: Reconsidering Genres: Rising, Borrowing, Circulating1 Heroic Couplets and Eighteenth-Century Heroism: Pope’s Complicated CharactersSophie Gee2 “The Battle Without Killing”: Eliza Haywood and the Politics of Attempted RapeKate Parker3 The Novel’s Poem Envy: Mid-Century Fiction and the “Thing Poem” Christina Lupton and Aran Ruth4 “To delineate the human mind in its endless varieties”: Integral Lyric and Characterization in the Tales of Amelia OpieShelley KingPart II: Reconsidering Subjects and Objects5 Undividing the Subject of Literary History: From James Thomson's Poetry to Daniel Defoe's NovelsWolfram Schmidgen6 The Rise of the Novel and the Fall of Personification Heather Keenleyside7 “Light electric touches”: Sterne, Poetry, and Empirical Erotics David Fairer8 “Great labour both of mind and tongue”: Articulacy and Interiority in Young's Night Thoughts and Richardson's ClarissaJoshua Swidzinski9 The Art of Attention: Navigating Distraction and Rhythms of Focus in Eighteenth-Century PoetryNatalie PhillipsCoda: Time, Space, and the Poetic Mind of the NovelMargaret DoodyBibliographyNotes on Contributors