THE NOVELISTIC POEM AND THE POETICAL NOVEL: TOWARDS A THEORY OF GENERIC INTERRELATION IN THE ROMANTIC PERIOD by Nick Bujak A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland July 2014 © 2014 Nick Bujak All Rights Reserved Abstract This dissertation examines the shifting set of formal and conceptual relations that have structured the intertwined development and reception of “the novel” and “poetry” since the Romantic period. In Part One, I focus on the continuing rise of the novel in the age of best-selling poetry, arguing that narrative poetry and the novel participated in a shared history of narrative innovation. I take the popular and formally innovative poems of Walter Scott as a particularly important example of poetry’s contribution to this shared history. Specifically, I argue that Scott’s knowledge of the ballad tradition and his modern experiments with poetry in that mode enabled him to introduce narrative techniques into the novel that prepare the way for the deployment of free indirect discourse in the novels of Jane Austen and her successors. More broadly, I attempt to describe a theory of generic interrelation that is capable of identifying and explaining the interrelated formal development of works written during the Romantic period. In Part Two, I work to recover and analyze the complex history of perceptions about genre from the Romantic period through the twentieth century. Since the Romantic period itself, many thinkers have been interested in identifying what is essentially poetic about poetry, and, as a closely related matter, in determining what can distinguish poetry from prose and the novel. But, as narrative poetry has declined in popularity, and as the novel has emerged as the dominant modern genre, the terms of these discussions—and the experiences and expectations of reading that prompt them—have not remained static. The reception of Lord Byron’s Don Juan provides a particularly fascinating example of this gradual change in generic perception. While in the nineteenth century there was a widespread conviction that the poem was too shockingly inappropriate to really qualify as ii “Poetry”—a poem that was not at all poetic—by the twentieth century critics are praising it for its novelistic features. I trace the long history of Don Juan’s reception as a way of drawing attention to an underappreciated feature of literary history: that perceptions of genres themselves are subject to historical change. iii Acknowledgments In the fall of 2003—my freshman year at Rutgers University—I haphazardly enrolled in a class on twentieth century poetry. I expected to be a philosophy major, and I didn’t particularly like poetry, so it’s not at all clear what I was thinking. What seemed to be a small decision at the time actually became one of the more momentous in my academic career. And so, I’d like to begin by thanking the many dedicated teachers in the department of English at Rutgers University, without whom I would never have even thought to pursue a serious study of literature. Harriet Davidson deserves special recognition in this regard, as she was the first to show me how poetry can provide nourishment for the curious and ambitious mind. Billy Galperin, too, was an invaluable undergraduate advisor, and he has been incredibly generous in his willingness to continue reading my work—including this entire dissertation—throughout my years as a graduate student. At Hopkins, I have benefitted from an engaging, accessible, and challenging faculty, all of whom contributed to my understanding of what it means to think and write about literature. Chris Nealon’s openness to new ideas helped me to form the conceptual core of this dissertation, while his pointed questions to me throughout the process of writing have helped me to continue shaping it. Amanda Anderson, Sharon Cameron, and Richard Halpern were especially inspiring to me as a young graduate student—I’ve often worked to make my arguments in this dissertation stronger by imagining how they would react to them. Though he joined the team late, Jonathan Kramnick’s shrewd advice has been essential to me as I’ve revised these chapters into their final form. Many current and former graduate student colleagues read and responded to parts of earlier versions of this iv dissertation. Thanks especially to Patrick Fessenbecker, Robert Day, Doug Tye, Stephanie Hershinow, and Christiane Gannon, all of whom have helped me to see what I meant to be saying, and, perhaps more importantly, have saved me from a great deal of embarrassment for saying what I didn’t mean. For their conversation and friendship, both in and out of academic settings, I also thank Maggie Vinter, Beth Steedley, and Jennie Hann. I feel unequal to the task of expressing in words the gratitude I feel for Frances Ferguson. She has done more than read and edit every single line in the dissertation—she has helped me to figure out what it means to be writing a dissertation at all. I think particularly of our weekly meetings, very early in the process of dissertating, where the only agenda was to talk about what I had read and written in the previous week. These conversations, like so many others with Frances, found a secret passage to the deepest recesses of my thinking mind, where they have seemed to transform everything. Indeed, I’m regularly surprised to realize that a thought, or a particular way of constructing a thought, is very clearly something I have learned from Frances. In ways big and small, obvious and subtle, this dissertation has been the beneficiary of Frances’s generosity and intelligence. During the many years that the dissertation has been under construction, I’ve had the benefit of testing out its arguments in front of audiences at Narrative, the MLA, and NASSR conferences, and been lucky to have parts of it published in Narrative and SEL. I’m particularly grateful to Jim Phelan, whose patience and editorial insight helped me transform some stray observations into a real theoretical argument. I’d also like to thank v the many reviewers of scholarly journals whose detailed rejection letters to earlier versions of these chapters have both challenged and assisted me in the process of revision. I thank my wife Mary for kindly putting up with me and continuing to take me seriously during the hardest parts of this journey. I also thank my cats, Sam and Jasper, in whose friendly company I spent almost every moment while researching and writing this dissertation. Finally, I thank my parents for always encouraging me to be weird. vi Table of Contents Abstract i Acknowledgments iv List of Figures viii 1 INTRODUCTION Formal and Conceptual Approaches to the Study of Generic Interrelation Part One 24 CHAPTER ONE Form and Generic Interrelation in the Romantic Period 54 CHAPTER TWO The Form of Media History: Stabilizing Narrator-Space in the Poetry of Walter Scott 81 CHAPTER THREE The Future of Narration: Stabilizing Narrator-Space in Marmion and The Lady of the Lake 126 CHAPTER FOUR “The Custom of Storytellers”: Fielding, Waverley, and Austen Part Two 179 CHAPTER FIVE Becoming a Novel: Don Juan and the Historical Perception of Genre 230 CONCLUSION Notes 236 Bibliography 265 Curriculum Vita 274 vii List of Figures 139 FIGURE 4.1 Mapping Fielding and Scott 208 FIGURE 5.1 The Literary Gazette De-Lineates Byron viii INTRODUCTION Formal and Conceptual Approaches to the Study of Generic Interrelation As Stuart Curran has observed, “it is hard for a later culture to grasp” the extent to which Romantic-era British culture was “simply mad for poetry.”1 Not only have novels emerged as the dominant, and nearly exclusive form of popular literary entertainment, but, as a related matter, narrative or story-based poetry has almost entirely ceased to be written. Instead, “lyric”—often written to be short, complex, and difficult—is now nearly synonymous with the category of “poetry.” Thus, as Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have memorably claimed, poetics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has witnessed a “super-sizing of the lyric.”2 Recent adherents of the so-called New Lyric studies like Jackson and Prins—and the thinkers whom they claim as their intellectual ancestors—have attempted to problematize and analyze this strange history of the lyric, often producing results so surprising as to demand a rethinking of many of our most basic concepts and practices of literary and genre history.3 Gerard Genette’s essay, “The Architext,” is perhaps the most damning of these recent assessments. Equal parts intellectual history and critique, the power of “The Architext” consists in two basic claims: first, that nearly every modern thinker of any import has accepted and helped to proliferate a view that “lyric” is one of the three “natural” (and ancient) divisions in literary writing (the other two being drama and epic); and, second, that this belief is merely a “retrospective illusion . deeply rooted in our conscious, or unconscious, literary minds.”4 Instead, as Genette shows, the elevation of lyric to a basic literary category is an invention of early-modern thought, and 1 the many kinds of writing it describes have never been coherently related to each other. The term has become a “negative catch-all (for everything that is neither narrative or dramatic),” with the result that we have come to think of lyric both as an overarching category that contains many subgenres and, since the Romantic period, as its own distinctive genre that contains a “thematic element [that] eludes purely formal or linguistic definitions.”5 Thus, in the words of Jackson and Prins, while “we take it for granted that we know what a lyric is,” it is at the same time as “notoriously difficult to define lyric as it is impossible to define poetry itself.”6 This elevation of lyric to its current place of prestige is a significant chapter in the history of poetics, but it also has important repercussions for a study of generic interrelation.