This thesis is presented in two parts. The first part, Dreamriser, is a verse-novel in two books, the second part a critical essay, ‘Writing the Postcolonial Body’ in Les Murray’s 1997 verse-novel Fredy Neptune. Dreamriser is split into two books. In ‘The Runner’ Felix Morning wakes on a backstreet of a strange city with no memory of who he is. Flick shows him the way to The Bunker, an underground club where he meets the Dreamriser, a mysterious woman he half remembers. She gives him a parcel he must deliver to the place of the lost things. In ‘Pinky’ Iain and Esther meet on a train and they start a love affair. Damaged by her experience with men, Esther has been sent by the Dreamriser cult to take her revenge. When she falls in love with Iain she must make a choice between destruction and union. Dreamriser was inspired by the idea of the verse-novel, its possibilities and parameters. But where Fredy Neptune is an extended narrative through Twentieth Century history, Dreamriser messes with time frames and layers of reality and is located within the lost interior ‘history’ of the protagonists. I was interested in finding out how far I could push the lyric under the pressure of narrative, and play with the idea of linear narrative under the pressure of the lyric. I hoped to achieve a sense of the lyric poem across the whole structure of the ‘verse-novel’ as much as within each stanza, section or chapter. In this way Dreamriser mimics rather than attempts to emulate the conventional idea of the novel. Fredy Neptune moves towards and is constantly seeking that resolution and return to wholeness for its protagonist; Dreamriser refuses and actively undermines expectations of resolution and conclusion. Where Dreamriser and Fredy Neptune meet is in their treatment of the body as subject and material for the poem, in the location of the mind and the myriad layers of identity within the body, and in its consideration of gender and gender relations. In the following critical essay, ‘Writing the Postcolonial Body in Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune’ I look at how Murray addresses postcolonial identity in Australia in his verse novel through the medium of the body. History, gender, national identity and the poem itself are embodied in the very act of writing and in the physical experience of reading the poem. I argue that Murray writes identity through the body in the poem of Fredy Neptune.

Because of its importance in the history of the verse novel and the history of women’s writing, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) has overshadowed the works of other female verse novelists in Victorian studies scholarship. By focusing on non-canonical works by four understudied women poets writing in the late nineteenth century— Augusta Webster’s “Lota” (1867), Violet Fane’s Denzil Place: A Story in Verse (1875), Emily Pfeiffer’s The Rhyme of the Lady of the Rock, and How It Grew (1884), and Emily Hickey’s “Michael Villiers, Idealist” (1891)—this dissertation expands our understanding of both women’s poetry and the verse novel in the Victorian period. It demonstrates that the genre was taken up in multiple ways after Aurora Leigh by women poets who, like EBB, addressed urgent and controversial social and political issues—such as parliamentary enfranchisement, adultery, marital rape, political sovereignty and land use in the Scottish Highlands, as well as socialism and the Irish Question— through inventive and complex generic combinations. This dissertation does not outline a teleological development of genre but, rather, recovers works through case studies that offer microhistories of verse novels at particular historical moments in order to expand the canon and definition of the Victorian verse novel. / Graduate / 2020-04-25