Lyric Transformations: From Lyrical Ballads to Sprung Rhythm

Catalog description

The fate of lyric in nineteenth-century British Literature. An expansion of the traditional category of lyric to include both narrative and dramatic forms of poetry, yielding such hybrid forms as lyrical ballads and lyricized epic fragments, on the one hand, and monodrama, dramatic monologues, conversation poems, and Romantic closet drama, on the other. The transformation of the courtly form of the sonnet into vehicles of domesticated sentiment, and the emergence of sprung rhythm and symbolism by century's end.