Eighteenth-century British literary history was long characterized by two central and seemingly discrete movements-the emergence of the novel and the development of Romantic lyric poetry. In fact, recent scholarship reveals that these genres are inextricably bound: constructions of interiority developed in novels changed ideas about what literature could mean and do, encouraging the new focus on private experience and self-perception developed in lyric poetry. In Lyric Generations, Gabrielle Starr rejects the genealogy of lyric poetry in which Romantic poets are thought to have built solely and directly upon the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. She argues instead that novelists such as Richardson, Haywood, Behn, and others, while drawing upon earlier lyric conventions, ushered in a new language of self-expression and community which profoundly affected the aesthetic goals of lyric poets. Examining the works of Cowper, Smith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats in light of their competitive dialogue with the novel, Starr advances a literary history that considers formal characteristics as products of historical change. In a world increasingly defined by prose, poets adapted the new forms, characters, and moral themes of the novel in order to reinvigorate poetic practice.

Refreshingly, this impressive study of poetic form does not read the eighteenth century as a slow road to Romanticism, but fleshes out the period with surprising and important new detail. Times Literary Supplement In this intriguing formal study Starr breaks down the conventional barriers between the history of poetry and the history of the novel... Overall, a subtle and carefully executed genre study, of interest to anyone in 18th-century or Romantic studies. Choice For fifteen years or so, using a term provided by Mikhail Bakhtin, some Wordsworthians have characterized Wordsworth's lyric poetry as 'novelized.' G. Gabrielle Starr's Lyric Generations gives that characterization new force en specificity in the context of a larger argument that traces the interrelations of poetry and the novel through the long eighteenth century. -- Don Bialostosky Wordsworth Circle The rise of the novel, argues Starr, is strongly influenced by the lyric poetry which preceded it, while at the other end of the century romantic poetry owes much, in turn, to the rise of the novel. -- Bill Phillips Cercles Starr is an excellent close reader, and her observations about so large and diverse an array of texts are fresh, striking, and downright smart. -- Sophie Gee Eighteenth-Century Fiction Starr provides a brilliant reading of Clarissa. -- Christopher Johnson New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century Starr excels... in juxtaposing works seldom compared and so granting us the wherewithal to reframe familiar histories of formal change. -- Deirdre Lynch Modern Language Quarterly Original and compelling book... that should inspire discussion for some time to come. -- Anne Williams Studies in Romanticism

G. Gabrielle Starr is the Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science and a professor of English at New York University. The recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, she is the author of Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience.