Description
Book SynopsisIn a world increasingly defined by prose, poets adapted the new forms, characters, and moral themes of the novel in order to reinvigorate poetic practice.
Trade ReviewRefreshingly, 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 In this intriguing formal study Starr breaks down the conventional barriers between the history of poetry and the history of the novel... Overall, a subtle and carefully executed genre study, of interest to anyone in 18th-century or Romantic studies. Choice For fifteen years or so, using a term provided by Mikhail Bakhtin, some Wordsworthians have characterized Wordsworth's lyric poetry as 'novelized.' G. Gabrielle Starr's Lyric Generations gives that characterization new force en specificity in the context of a larger argument that traces the interrelations of poetry and the novel through the long eighteenth century. -- Don Bialostosky Wordsworth Circle The rise of the novel, argues Starr, is strongly influenced by the lyric poetry which preceded it, while at the other end of the century romantic poetry owes much, in turn, to the rise of the novel. -- Bill Phillips Cercles Starr is an excellent close reader, and her observations about so large and diverse an array of texts are fresh, striking, and downright smart. -- Sophie Gee Eighteenth-Century Fiction Starr provides a brilliant reading of Clarissa. -- Christopher Johnson New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century Starr excels... in juxtaposing works seldom compared and so granting us the wherewithal to reframe familiar histories of formal change. -- Deirdre Lynch Modern Language Quarterly Original and compelling book... that should inspire discussion for some time to come. -- Anne Williams Studies in Romanticism
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Clarissa and the Lyric
2. Modes of Absorption
3. Lyric Tensions
4. Rhetorical Realisms
5. The Limits of Lyric and the Space of the Novel
6. The Novel and the New Lyricism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
