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Browning's The Ring and the Book: “A Novel Country”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
Henry James declared in “The Novel in The Ring and the Book” that he had long thought of the twelve-book poem as an unsuccessful novel of the “so-called historical sort.” He thought that the manner of its production “tragically spoiled” and “smothered” Browning's intention in writing his novel-in-verse. James identifies that intention as the desire to present a “study of the manners and conditions from which our own have … issued.” James's desire for the structure to build a coherent love story around Pompilia and Caponsacchi blinded him to the processive nature of Browning's study of how art represents the manners and conditions from which our own have issued. What James laments as “the great loose and uncontrolled composition” and the “great heavy-hanging cluster of related but unresolved parts” actually constitutes rather than spoils the novelistic force of The Ring and the Book if we define the novel in Mikhail Bakhtin's manner as a revolutionary process rather than as a fixed generic form.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983
References
NOTES
1. James, Henry, Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes (New York: Charles Scribner's & Sons, 1916), p. 307.Google Scholar
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6. Browning, Robert, The Ring and the Book, ed. Altick, Richard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971)Google Scholar. All further references to the poem are indicated by book and line number in the body of this paper.
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13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 451.
15. Ibid., p. 446.
16. Ibid.
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