THE VICTORIAN VERSE NOVEL AS BESTSELLER: OWEN MEREDITH'S<i>LUCILE</i>
Journal: Victorian Literature and Culture
Year: 2017

By the 1860s, the verse novel had become a significant feature of the Victorian literary landscape. According to Dino Felluga, this hybrid was a “perverse” and even “subversive” genre, firstly, because it undermined the “‘high’ autotelic” status of poetry by mixing it with the “heteroglot, carnivalesque, and polyphonic novel” and, secondly, because its specific fictions tended to oppose or parody the “middle-class heterosexual, domestic ideology” upheld by the prose novel of the period. In suppo