Abstract
Chapter 4, “Amours de Voyage: The Verse-Novel and European Travel,” reflects on the expansive generic geography of the form. Like the influential ur-text Don Juan, almost all verse-novels exhibit what Clough calls amours de voyage. The chapter considers overlapping thematic and structural aspects of travel in a group of explicitly cosmopolitan verse-novels (Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Owen Meredith’s Lucile and Glenaveril, and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy): their use of the railway, of guidebooks, of epistolarity, and of plots involving hybrid heredity. The spatial energies of verse-novels often avoid not only the epic teloi of nation founding and empire building but also the novelistic telos of the courtship plot: marriage. These works travel in order to destabilize both their generic terrain and their ideological certainties. A postscript considers William Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, an exception to this travelling spirit that proves the rule.
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