Romantic poetry and the romantic novel and imperial frames to the poetic tales thereby contained The prose romance, on the other hand, almost always featured ballads, songs, and other poetic inserts The “Table of the Poetry” in the preliminary matter of The Monk calls attention to Lewis’s poetical offerings scattered throughout the narrative, and the title pages of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic romances typically advertised that the narratives were “Interspersed with some Pieces of Poetry.” Literary histories of the day discussed romances and novels (whether in verse or prose) as “fictitious narratives” with primitive or ancient origins, taking oral or written, poetic or prose form Clara Reeve’s introduction to her novel The Old English Baron (1778) is standard: “Fictitious Stories have been the delight of all times and all countries, by oral tradition in barbarous, by writing in more civilized ones.” New romances and tales were celebrated as revivals of old forms, continuing the tradition of the medieval romances that the antiquarians of the day were busy recovering and publishing; together these new and rediscovered texts formed a “romance revival” that defined Britain’s emerging national, vernacular literary tradition Mixing genres became a deliberate strategy to represent the different periods of that tradition: the prose footnotes of a verse romance or the excerpted ballad within a national tale stage the progress and development of literary history and genres within a single, culminating, and all-inclusive form The sentimental novels of the period also included verse to such a degree that they must be seen as a major force in shaping the cultural position of poetry in these years, a framing device that, in particular, challenges many of our entrenched notions about lyric subjectivity Charlotte Smith’s novels follow the literary conventions of sensibility by quoting lines of poetry within their narratives and by representing their characters as reading, writing, and discussing poetry As Leah Price has demonstrated, such novels reveal their affinities to commonplace books and anthologies, excerpting and collecting literary bits and pieces, drawing on and constructing a literary archive assumed to be shared and familiar.41 Quoting Shakespeare, Thomson, or the old ballads in a novel may also be seen as a strategy for mapping the world of that novel on to the world of the readers, as characters and readers alike read and repeat the same texts Lyric lines within a novel thereby take on a much greater social function than we may expect For example, when Orlando, the hero of Smith’s The Old Manor House (1794), finds the windows of his lover’s room dark and empty, Smith describes his reaction first from the perspective of external observation: “he stopped, and gazed mournfully on the place which perhaps no longer contained the object of his affection.”42 She then evokes a generally recognized degree of pain, effectively locating Orlando’s emotion outside Orlando: 129 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008