The Verse Novel as Genre: Contradiction or Hybrid?
2009; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2374-6629
Autores Tópico(s)Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies
ResumoAn explosion of new books subtitling themselves or in has followed the success of Vikram Seth's 1986 The Golden Gate. Sometimes identifying themselves by means of a publisher's blurb on the back cover rather than by a subtitle, English-language verse novels are becoming signature texts of the turn-of-the-millennium period. Australia may seem a world leader in the form, with the groundbreaking work of figures such as Dorothy Porter (Akhenaten, The Monkey's Mask, Wild Surmise), Les Murray (The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, Fredy Neptune) and Alan Wearne (The Nightmarkets, The Lovemakers) being imitated or adapted by numerous other writers. But recent verse novels in English are actually confined very little by locality, for they have appeared as well in places as far apart as Canada, New Zealand, England, South Africa, America and India. They also appear unrestricted as to subject matter, which includes science fiction, for example Frederick Turner's The New World, Frederick Pollaek's Happiness and John Barnie's Ice; stories based on classical myth, such as Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and Porter's Akhenaten; community and family histories, either real or fictional, as in History: The Home Movie by Craig Raine, Darlington's Fall by Brad Leithauser, Judevine by David Budbill, Byrne by Anthony Burgess, and Dark Rooms by Siddharth Katragadda. Some are picaresque, such as Ana Castillo's Watercolor Women/Opaque Men and Bernadine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe; others trace internal journeys in which psychological healing or recognition takes place, as in Mary Rakow's The Memory Room and Diane Brown's 8 Stages of Grace. Porter's The Monkey's Mask, Martha Grimes's Send Bygraves and H R F Keating's Jack the Lady Killer are murder mysteries. Many verse novels, including Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons by Marilyn Hacker and The Beauty of the Husband by Carson, are love stories. Jordie Albiston's The Hanging of Jean Lee is a sort of documentary. Texts for children and young adults abound, some popular examples being Virginia Euwer Wolff's Make Lemonade, Steven Herrick's Love, Ghosts & Nose Hair and Juan Felipe Herrera's Crashboomlove. Interestingly, these texts seem equally unrestricted as to prosody, the majority being composed in a wide variety of free verse forms, varying from the enigmatic short-line forms of Porter and Castillo to the long, page-covering, run-on lines of Murray and (at times) Rakow. But some are composed in traditional metres and stanzas, including ottava rima (Wayne Koestenbaum's Model Homes, most of Burgess's Byrne), tetrameter couplets (Ranjit Bolt's Losing It), Spenserian stanzas (part of Byrne), sonnets (Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons) and Onegin-stanzas (Seths's The Golden Gate, Keating's Jack the Lady Killer, Matt Rubinstein's Solstice). Wearne's verse novels employ a wide variety of different stanza forms for different sections of their narratives. Others use traditional forms but not always perfectly, so that aspects of the pattern exist only liminally for a reader, as in Derek Walcott's inimitable Omeros, which uses terza rima, and .Fred D'Aguiar's Bloodlines, in ottava rima. Still others, for example Leithauser's Darlington's Fall, invent wholly new verse forms, neither free nor traditional. Of course, the verse novel is not an entirely new phenomenon, dating back at least to Anna Seward's Louisa: A Poetical Novel, published in 1784. According to Dino Felluga (171-73), the verse novel had its heyday in England in the later nineteenth century, when the longer works of Arthur Hugh Clough, the Brownings and Tennyson were published--but Felluga fails to note the corresponding popularity of, if not the verse novel, at least the long narrative poem in America during the same period, which saw the publication of some of Longfellow's longer works as well as Melville's Clarel. And, pace Felluga, the form did not die out after 1870, though its appearances became somewhat sparse and obscure during the earlier twentieth century. …
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