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Full Description
Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts draws on the notion of the 'gutter' in graphic narratives - the gap between panels that a reader has to imaginatively fill to generate narrative sequence - to analyse the largely overlooked literary form of the verse novel. Marked at all levels by the tense constellation of segment and sequence, and a conspicuously 'gappy' texture, verse novels offer productive alternatives to the dominant prose novel in contemporary fiction, where a similar 'gappiness' has become a hallmark, as illustrated by the loosely interlaced multi-strand plot structures of influential 'world novels' (Bolaño, Mitchell, Powers).
The verse novel is a form particularly prolific in the postcolonial world and among diasporic or minoritarian writers in the Global North. This study concentrates on two of the most prominent areas in which verse novels distinguish themselves from the prose novel to read texts by Derek Walcott, Anne Carson, Bernardine Evaristo, Patience Agbabi and others: In 'planetary' verse novels from the Caribbean, Canada, Samoa and Hawai'i, the central trope of the volcano evokes a world in constant un/making; while post-national verse novels, particularly in Britain, modify the established paradigms of imagined communities. Dirk Wiemann's study speculates whether the resurgence of verse novels correlates with the apprehension of inhabiting a world that has become unpredictable and dangerous but also promising: a 'post-prosaic' world.
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
1. Introduction: In the gutter ...
1.1 Gutter texts and the politics of form
1.2 Verse novels as gutter texts
1.3 Gappiness and incompleteness
1.4 Connexionism and minor cosmopolitanisms
1.5 Gappy planet and incomplete nation: Michael Cawood Green's Sinking
2. Volcanic verses: The planet as verb
2.1 Sibylline cures: Derek Walcott's Omeros
2.2 'Links between geology and character': Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red
2.3 The space that connects: Albert Wendt's The Adventures of Vela
2.4 The planet as praxis: W.S. Merwin's The Folding Cliffs
3. In/verse Britain: The poetics of the post-nation
3.1 A million epiphanies now: Kae Tempest's Let Them Eat Chaos
3.2 'But I dreamt of creating mosaics': Bernardine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe
3.3 Detoxing England: Patience Agbabi's Telling Tales
3.4 Untelling tales: Anagrammatic Blackness in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!
4. Epilogue: ... looking at the stars
Bibliography
Index
