Special Topics Paper Summary

 For my special topics paper, I wrote about the novel in verse, also known as the verse novel, as an emerging genre. Although some argument about when the novel in verse was invented, so to speak, exists, evidence from scholars suggests that the novel in verse originated between the 1100s and 1700s. Zagklas proposes the novel in verse came about during the “twelfth-century Byzantine” (Zagklas, 2017, p. 230). However, other scholars argue that William Chamberlayne’s Pharronida, published in 1659 (Poe, 2000, p. 319), or “Anna Seward’s Louisa: A Poetical Novel, in Four Epistles, published in 1784” (Addison, 2009, p. 540), established the basis for the genre of novels in verse. However, the epic poem, the first of which was the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, is the predecessor to the novel in verse (Sauerberg, 2004, p. 440). Today, authors of novels in verse generally write them in free verse that is “spare on punctuation and capital letters, favouring short lines and very dependent on line-endings of intonational emphasis and suspenseful pause” (Addison, 2017, p. 359). Despite the differences between novels in verse and the traditional prose novel, one similarity between the two is that they both vary across different genres and forms; resultingly, novels in verse have begun to receive nominations for or win prestigious book awards, sometimes in the fiction or nonfiction category, and sometimes in the poetry category. More often, however, novels in verse receive nominations or win for the fiction or nonfiction category; this difference in the number of nominations helps explain the contrasting arguments raised in two different articles I consulted for my paper: Joy Alexander’s “The Verse-novel: A New Genre” and Catherine Addison’s “The Verse Novel as Genre: Contradiction or Hybrid?” Alexander considers whether the novel in verse corresponds to current categories (Alexander, 2017, p. 270). On the other hand, Addison questions whether the novel in verse constitutes an original genre or form Addison, 2009, p. 540).

    References:

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Sauerberg, L.O. (2004). Repositioning narrative: The late-twentieth-century verse novels of Vikram Seth, Derek Walcott, Craig Raine, Anthony Burgess, and Bernadine Evaristo. Orbis litterarum, 59(6), 439–464.

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Zagklas, N. (2017). Experimenting with prose and verse in twelfth-century Byzantium. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 71. 229-248. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26497751