The Poetics of Poesis: The Making of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction

Examining nineteenth-century novels and philosophical essays on the conception of fictional form, Felicia Bonaparte sees the novel in this period not as the continuation of eighteenth-century realism but as a genre unto itself. Determined to address the crises that had shattered the age, and drawing on the thought of the early German Romantics, these novelists created a form that would remake the world. They spoke of this process as poesis, with the purpose of embodying the idealistic in the real and the requirement of a double plot and a double language to convey it. The novel carried this double meaning in the language of mythical symbolism. Bonaparte argues that it is in such language that this fiction must be read.