Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered

Kate Parker and Courtney Weiss Smith (Eds.)

2013
280 pages
ISBN 9781611484830
Transits

Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered begins with the brute fact that poetry jostled up alongside novels in the bookstalls of eighteenth-century England. Indeed, by exploring unexpected collisions and collusions between poetry and novels, this volume of exciting, new essays offers a reconsideration of the literary and cultural history of the period. The novel poached from and featured poetry, and the "modern" subjects and objects privileged by "rise of the novel" scholarship are only one part of a world full of animate things and people with indistinct boundaries. Contributors: Margaret Doody, David Fairer, Sophie Gee, Heather Keenleyside, Shelley King, Christina Lupton, Kate Parker, Natalie Phillips, Aran Ruth, Wolfram Schmidgen, Joshua Swidzinski, and Courtney Weiss Smith.

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Reviews

"This immensely rewarding book manages to shed new light on eighteenth-century literature by putting it in dialogue with post-humanist cosmologies and actor-network theory, the new formalism, neuroscience, and media archeology."
-Tobias Menely, University of California-Davis; The BARS Review (No. 49), Spring 2017

"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...This major collection from Bucknell, a leader in 18th-century studies, is required reading for scholars."
--J. T. Lynch, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark; Choice (August 2014)

"Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered is a provocative and timely collection well worth the attention of the reader who wishes, as Smith states in her introductory remarks, to "grapple with unexpected collisions and collusions between poetry and novels" (xiv-xv)."
--Timothy Ruppert, Slippery Rock University; The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer (volume 29, no. 1), March 2015

"As Parker and Smith lay out in their fine critical introduction, and Sophie Gee develops in the opening essay, the collection builds on exciting new revisionary work in eighteenth-century studies, such as Sandra Macpherson's Harm's Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (2010), which moves away from understandings of the novel as a technology for producing interiority, towards exploration of subjects who move across genres and who are defined more troublingly against interiority, intentionality, or agency itself (16)."
--Ingrid Horrocks, Massey University Wellington; Eighteenth-Century Fiction Vol. 28, no. 2 (Winter 2015 - 16)

About the editors:

Kate Parker, professor and chair of English, teaches pre-1800 English and European cultural studies and feminism and sexuality studies at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse, a regional comprehensive university in the University of Wisconsin System.

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.

Paperback: 9781611487022; eBook: 9781611484847