Experiencing narrative poetry in the verse-novel for children and young adults: a verse-novel, Homing poems, with accompanying exegesis

The contemporary verse-novel for children and young adults is a hybrid genre that tends to use free verse poetry that is sometimes devoid of figurative language or other rhetorical qualifiers associated with poetry. As a result, many verse-novels have been criticised for consisting of chopped-up prose instead of poetry. This thesis challenges these critical positions by discussing how the notion of poetry is often delimited by traditionalist viewpoints, and by examining how contemporary culture and a recent paradigm shift in children's poetry may have fostered the verse-novel's evolution. Moreover, this study investigates how the narrative element of the verse-novel influences the shape and presentation of poetry, producing a reciprocal relationship between these two genres.