The second of two studies devoted to the interrelations of poetry and prose fiction, this volume examines the origins, development and flowering of the verse novel as a literary hybrid. While the first study was concerned with the different ways in which novelists have incorporated poetry into their fictions, what is analysed here is the manner in which poets have adopted novelistic genres and techniques and adapted these to the prosodic requirements of rhyming, blank and free verse in order to produce original literary blends. The novel may thus acquire a fresh dimension by being re-immersed in its original verse narrative sources and poetry be rendered more accessible to a wider reading public. Beginning with Pushkin, who was the first to coin the term "verse novel" to describe his masterpiece Eugene Onegin, the first section of this study considers a number of nineteenth-century Romantic and Victorian verse narratives, as well as some mid-twentieth-century experimental works, which can be seen to have contributed to the rise of the verse novel. The second, much longer, section concentrates on the period 1980-2010, which witnessed the full fruition of the verse novel as a multicultural fictional genre. A selection of some two dozen verse novels from this period, notably those by Anthony Burgess, Anne Carson, Glyn Maxwell, Les Murray, Vikram Seth and Derek Walcott, are discussed in terms of both their novelistic and their prosodic merits.

Taking up Virginia Woolf's provocative claim that "the best prose is that which is most full of poetry", this study examines the different ways in which novelists have incorporated poetry into the fabric of their fictions. The inclusion of poems in a novel may serve a variety of purposes: to heighten the atmosphere, to represent a character's sensations and thoughts as "stream of consciousness", to illustrate a protagonist's creative output, to provide an explicit or embedded literary illusion, to function as an interlude or structural divider, or to create an unclassifiable literary hybrid that highlights an author's dual talents. To illustrate these and other forms of integration, twenty-two works of prose fiction are analysed under five headings: textual composites that combine prose, poetry and poetic prose to achieve original effects; apprenticeship novels about the development of fictive poets and their work; fictions concerned with the investigation and appropriation of a dead poet's opus; works in which a single long poem constitutes a novel's principal focus; and research-based biofictions relating particular events in the lives of real poets. Intended to stimulate reflection on the interrelations of prose and poetry, this book works against literary compartmentalization by revealing how poetry can enhance prose narrative and how the novel can bring poetry to the notice of a wider reading public.