By the 1860s, the verse novel had become a significant feature of the Victorian literary landscape. According to Dino Felluga, this hybrid was a “perverse” and even “subversive” genre, firstly, because it undermined the “‘high’ autotelic” status of poetry by mixing it with the “heteroglot, carnivalesque, and polyphonic novel” and, secondly, because its specific fictions tended to oppose or parody the “middle-class heterosexual, domestic ideology” upheld by the prose novel of the period. In support of his argument, Felluga discusses a handful of texts that are normally regarded as “high” literature: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage, George Meredith's Modern Love and Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (Felluga, “Verse Novel” 171–74; “Novel Poetry” 491–96).