The impact of lyric, drama, and verse narrative on novel form

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.036

34 - The impact of lyric, drama, and verse narrative on novel form

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012

Stefanie Markovits

Edited by

Robert L. Caserio and

Clement Hawes

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Robert L. Caserio: Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Clement Hawes: Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Summary

Standing atop the generic food chain of literature, the novel has yet to meet a genre it is unwilling or unable to consume, being equally capable of lyric, epic, and dramatic attitudes. Such is one implication of Bakhtin's recognition of the form's heteroglossic capacity to incorporate a “diversity” of “generic languages” and “inserted genres.” This omnivorous approach has served the novel well in a competitive literary marketplace, making it capable of adjusting quickly to changes in the cultural landscape. As Bakhtin writes, compared with other forms, “the novel appears to be a creature from an alien species. It gets on poorly with other genres. It fights for its own hegemony in literature; wherever it triumphs, the other older genres go into decline” (4). The decline, he insists, is based on the novel's integration of other genres and on the transformation that accompanies such integration: “Under conditions of the novel every direct word – epic, lyric, strictly dramatic – is to a greater or lesser degree made into an object … that quite often appears ridiculous in this framed condition” (49–50).

But as David Kurnick points out, “we need a more capacious model of generic interaction than one that understands literary forms as engaged in a kind of Darwinian struggle for survival”; we also need to recognize in a new genre traces of what has been left behind, traces that reveal a kind of generic (almost genealogical) nostalgia.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of the English Novel , pp. 549 - 564

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.036 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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