-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Monique R Morgan, Emily Allen and Dino Franco Felluga. Novel-Poetry: The Shape of the Real and the Problem of Form, The Review of English Studies, 2025;, hgaf020, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgaf020
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Emily Allen and Dino Franco Felluga’s coauthored Novel-Poetry: The Shape of the Real and the Problem of Form is a fascinating study of the nineteenth-century British verse-novel, but its ambitions range well beyond that genre. Each of five chapters focuses on a specific verse-novel (by Lord Byron, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Meredith, and Robert Browning), but the book also includes two chapters on theory and two on a range of nineteenth-century British novels. The book as a whole ‘argue[s] that our understanding of our lives has been largely shaped by a particular version of temporality that was codified by the novel and that was subtended by a lyric understanding of rupture, transcendence, and truth’ (p. 8). Allen and Felluga offer compelling accounts of the ‘ideologically motivated definitions’ of both lyric poetry and realist narrative (p. 120), and they argue that the verse-novel not only ‘provides us a marvelously self-aware critique of both realistic chronology and the ecstatic, lyric “moment”’ (p. 38), but also sometimes offers an alternative model of temporality and action.
