Modern poetic prose: Lyricism, narrative, and the social implications of generic form

This dissertation combines research in poetics and narratology, genre theory and ideological analysis, and the 19th and 20th centuries in a project that traces the emergence and evolution of poetic prose in modern literature. Centering on Modernist writing, the study demonstrates how prose poetry, lyrical novels and poet's prose disrupt or transgress standard operations of language and discourse. Concurrently, it examines prose poetry's intimate links with social issues central to modernity, particularly urban poverty, the demise of empire, and competing constructions of individual and communal identity.; The study's focus on poetic prose challenges the generic and methodological frameworks that regulate our understanding of texts. The objective here is not to delineate and typify a single genre, but rather to demonstrate how the dynamic interaction of poetry and prose plays a vital role in the literature of modernity, largely by disrupting any overly static system of genres. The dissertation thus emphasizes the fluid social and ideological dimensions of generic form advocated by M. M. Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, and Fredric Jameson.; The role of genre in the production and reception of texts is initially explored through detailed readings of the "impassioned prose" of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and the "moitie prose" of Max Jacob's Le Cornet a des. Chapter 2 examines the influence of urbanity and industrialism on lyrical and narrative voices in the prosaic verse of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and the prose poems of Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris. Further pursuing the clash between poetic and narrative modes, Chapter 3 charts the status of poetry in the context of turn-of-the-century imperialism with a reading of Conrad's poetic novella Heart of Darkness; Conrad 's interweaving of Realism and Symbolism is considered in relation to the prose poems of Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer.; With readings of both essays and fiction--particularly the lyrical novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse--Chapter 4 demonstrates how Virginia Woolf's dual poeticization and politicization of the novel sought to rewrite lyric consciousness as an inherently social form. The final chapter, assessing W. C. Williams' Spring and All and Kora in Hell: Improvisations, ties the confrontation between poetic imagination and prosaic fact found in Williams' poet's prose with conflicts in his lived life as a poet and doctor. A concluding coda traces the aesthetic and political configurations of poetic prose in the more recent work of North American writers Ron Silliman and Bruce Andrews, concentrating on the fate of the sentence and of syntax in the wake of Williams' radical experiments with language.