This study is a creative and critical exploration of the poetic form of the contemporary verse novel. The project combines poetry and narrative to produce a collection of poems in verse novel form, the writing of which informs a dedicated critical assessment of the verse novel.
At the heart of the thesis is an original verse novel which tells the story of three
Irish women's experiences of emigration over a 150-year time period. It draws upon historical sources including an archive of letters housed by the National Library of Ireland in Dublin written by members of a family from County Kilkenny who emigrated to Australia in the 1850s. Using biographical materials as well as sourcebased historical analysis, I explore through creative practice such issues as emigrant identity, language and self-creation, using my own experiences as a UK-based twenty-first century Irish woman as a creative counterpoint.
The study also comprises an investigation of the verse novel form. I examine
primary examples of the verse narrative genre in its various forms - poetry sequences, long verse narratives and verse novels, paying particular attention to Wordsworth's Prelude, Byron's Don Juan, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the verse narratives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage, an early twentieth century example by Gilbert Frankau, Nabokov's Pale Fire, Anne Stevenson's Correspondences, Viham Seth' s Golden Gate, the verse novels of Australian poet, Dorothy Porter, History: The Home Movie by Craig Raine and more recent examples from Bernadine Evaristo, Deryn Rees-Jones and Fiona Sampson.