The collision of neoformalism and thing theory pushes questions of genre to the surface. In mid-Victorian writing, such questions emerge in diamond form. As diamonds were discovered in and imported from the colonies, unprecedented interest in and self-consciousness about the gems developed. In the period's literature they serve as generic touchstones, allowing writers to consider issues of form and encoding aspects of lyric and narrative practice. Tracing diamonds' generic function through brief readings of texts in different genres—history, lyric, the novel, and narrative verse—this essay suggests that the stones operate as signs of wider generic disturbance, as writers pushed against facets of the forms in which they worked in ways that would lead to modernism's more obvious formal fractures.
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