Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered

Bringing together work by distinguished and younger scholars, Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered takes seriously the connections between poetry and novels in the period between Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House and Amelia Opie’s Romanic-era novels.

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.

Contents Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction: Poetry, Novels, People, Things 1 Courtney Weiss Smith Part I: Reconsidering Genres: Rising, Borrowing, Circulating 1 Heroic Couplets and Eighteenth-Century Heroism: Pope's Complicated Characters Sophie Gee 2 "The Battle Without Killing": Eliza Haywood and the Politics of Attempted Rape Kate Parker 3 The Novel's Poem Envy: Mid-Century Fiction and the "Thing Poem" Christina Lupton and Aran Ruth 4 "To delineate the human mind in its endless varieties": Integral Lyric and Characterization in the Tales of Amelia Opie Shelley King Part II: Reconsidering Subjects and Objects 5 Undividing the Subject of Literary History: From James Thomson's Poetry to Daniel Defoe's Novels Wolfram Schmidgen 6 The Rise of the Novel and the Fall of Personification Heather Keenleyside 7 "Light electric touches": Sterne, Poetry, and Empirical Erotics David Fairer 8 "Great labour both of mind and tongue": Articulacy and Interiority in Young's Night Thoughts and Richardson's Clarissa Joshua Swidzinski 9 The Art of Attention: Navigating Distraction and Rhythms of Focus in Eighteenth-Century Poetry Natalie Phillips Coda: Time, Space, and the Poetic Mind of the Novel Margaret Doody Bibliography Notes on Contributors