Rereading Prose Fiction: Lyric Convention in Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood
G. Gabrielle Starr, Harvard University
Volume 12, no. 1, October 1999
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
“Prose fiction,” the default substitute for the complexities involved in the use of “novel” or “romance,” is a convenient term for speaking of Restoration or early eighteenth-century narratives; as a descriptive category, however, it is more misleading than historically precise. This is especially clear when one considers that most theories of the novel’s development in Britain do not account for, or even mention, the mixture of prose and poetry which constitutes much “prose” romance. In both British and continental traditions, romance is metrical in its beginning, changing slowly into a more varied and flexible form. Works such as Honore D’Urfe’s L’Astree, Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, and Mary Wroth’s Urania combine prose narratives with lyric forms that range from madrigal to lament, epithalamium, or sonnet. Lyrics, however, are not found only in pastoral romance. Even its heroic counterparts contain songs which erstwhile lovers seem unable to do without. As metrical romance begins to die, lyrics remain as a ghost in the prose, used by writers from Gascoigne forward to provide a glimpse of interior life. In the Arcadia, for example, poems are used to reveal the hidden, both as secrets and emotions: as Sidney put it, poems are “the badges of the passions” in his romance, the formal externalization of the stuff beneath the skin.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Aphra Behn” include:
Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power
by CYNTHIA RICHARDS (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Women, Comedy, and A Simple Story
by HYE-SOO LEE (ECF 20.2, Winter 2007-8)
Muddy Allegiance and Shiny Booty: Aphra Behn’s Anglo-Dutch Politics
by REBECCA S. WOLSK (ECF 17.1, October 2004)
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