Novel Poetry: Transgressing the Law of Genre

Abstract

The future calls for perverse crossings: between genres, between periods, between theories. Although critics have responded to the demand for interdisciplinary and cultural studies for many years now, there are a few boundaries that have, nonetheless, resisted transgression: in particular, those between the Romantic and Victorian periods and those between poetry and the novel. One reason for this resistance, of course, is the very structure of academia: jobs are generally advertised for either poetry or the novel, either the Romantic or Victorian periods. And various institutional structures support such divisions (national organizations, conferences, period and genre journals, even listservs). Such separations are, however, perfectly artificial, themselves the product of retroactive reconstructions of a [End Page 490] literary history that is, inevitably, much more mixed. With all deserved respect to Jerome McGann, 1 we have not Romantic but Victorian ideology to blame for many of these distinctions: the belief that the Victorians represent a hard separation from the perversities of the Byronic, histrionic, Romantic poet; the belief that the true poet must "succeed in excluding from his work every vestige of . . . lookings-forth into the outward and every-day world"; 2 the belief that poetry is a pure form separate from not only politics but also the messy comminglings of the heteroglot, carnivalesque, and polyphonic novel. 3