Repositioning Narrative: The Late‐Twentieth‐Century Verse Novels of Vikram Seth, Derek Walcott, Craig Raine, Anthony Burgess, and Bernadine Evaristo

Abstract

Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate (1986), Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990), Craig Raine's History: The Home Movie (1994), Anthony Burgess's Byrne: A Novel (1995), and Bernadine Evaristo's Lara (1997) are fictional works resembling the realist mainstream novel in all respects except for their mode of discourse, which is verse, not prose. This essay first considers the five verse novels in the perspective of literary history generally and then goes on to consider their verse features. Although similar in mode of discourse, the works differ widely in their intra‐, inter‐ and para‐textual invitations to contextual literary‐historical readings, a difference enhanced, arguably, by actual‐reader appreciation in interfacing with literary history and dynamics of present‐day mass‐media forms of artistic expression.