Abstract

As a tale of adulterous love, Violet Fane’s Denzil Place (1875) is a paradigmatic Victorian verse-novel. Its counter-traditionalism, like that of many examples of this understudied genre, stems not only from its subversion of the marriage plot but also from its formal hybridity. Recent criticism of long narrative poems focuses on epic, often bypassing discussions of lyricism and reducing novelistic elements to a disciplinary function. Fane’s treatment of love stages a contest between lyric and novelistic drives and temporalities. Denzil Place’s characteristic combination of cross-generic intertextuality and adulterous content reveals how “culture takes form” in and through the nineteenth-century novel in verse.

pdf

Share