Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered

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.

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