Narrative Lives, Lyric Selves: Autobiography and Poetic Form in 19th-Century Britain

Abstract

This dissertation demonstrates how the autobiographical mode breaks down traditional divisions between lyric and narrative forms in the 19th century. I argue that these formal categories are inadequate to describe the complex autobiographical situations we find in long poems such as Wordsworth’s Prelude, Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo,” or Tennyson’s In Memoriam. In poems such as these, lyric moments are organized (and reorganized) into distinct narrative sequences. Drawing upon definitions of lyric and narrative from the 19th century to the present, I argue that the autobiographical mode provides a framework for reading the complex representations of selfhood that often defy formal categorization. Ultimately, this project challenges the notion that such representations assume their most sophisticated forms in prose autobiography or the novel.