Losing the Margin

Invoked as the novel's generic other, poetry is simultaneously central and marginal in our understanding of the Victorian novel. Poetry is the idealism to the novel's realism, the elevated verse to the novel's prosaic prose, entering into our theories of the novel only so that it can be expelled. Even when we define the novel as the genre of complete inclusion, poetry is singled out as the ultimate expression of monoglossia, which the novel subsumes without altering its own generic identity. In my dissertation, Losing the Margin: Poetry and Poetic Form in the Victorian Novel, I argue that Victorian novelists engage poetry not as a simple foil against which to defend the borders of their genre, but as a shifting collection of representational techniques that highlight the limitations of the novel and attempt to transgress them.