

- #Sonnet sequences were written in language plus
- #Sonnet sequences were written in language professional
Outlines Wordsworth’s influence on the Victorian sonnet revival and the period’s emphasis on the purity and correctness of the Petrarchan form. Edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H.

“Sonnet and Sonnet Sequence.” In A Companion to Victorian Poetry.

Useful reference to recent criticism.Ĭhapman, Alison. Covers the tangential contribution of Tennyson and Browning to the genre, alongside that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and George Meredith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Īrgues that while the dramatic monologue was the great poetic innovation of the period, the exhuming of Renaissance models made the sonnet more narrative and dramatic. “The Victorian Sonnet.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet. In addition to chapters on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, studies the work of less critically noticed female sonneteers-Maria Norris, Dora Greenwell, Michael Field, and Isabella J. Significant contribution to gendered readings of the genre, an important complement to the Wagner 1996 survey of exclusively male sonneteers in the period. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Little Songs: Women, Silence and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet. Hughes 2010 and Cronin 2012 devote generous chapter subsections to the sonnet sequence.īillone, Amy Christine. Chapman 2002 and Campbell 2011 offer chapter-length overviews. This bias (though notably present again in Wagner 1996) has been redressed in recent years by works that concentrate on the sonnet writing of women poets exclusively ( Billone 2007), and by works that consider the powerful appeal of the sonnet to male and female poets equally ( Holmes 2005, Phelan 2005, van Remoortel 2011). While Going 1976 broke new ground in seeking to give the first critical history of the sonnet, it is largely a history of the achievement of male poets in the form. The overviews cited in this section reflect both the growth and the direction of interest in the sonnet form, from the last quarter of the 20th century to the present. More recently, interest has spread to the sonnets of working-class and noncanonical writers, and to concern with the sonnet’s power not only to challenge literary and cultural gender stereotypes, but also to address Victorian sexual mores and double standards, as well as class issues. This development was stimulated by the burgeoning attention given by feminist critics from the 1970s to the groundbreaking adaptation of the Renaissance love sonnet sequence by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The sonnet experiments of particular practitioners began to come into critical focus in the final quarter of the last century, however, and, since the 1990s critics and scholars have been documenting the revival and modification of the sonnet genre in the Victorian era. For much of the 20th century, critical attention to the Victorian sonnet per se was largely subordinated to interest in the general poetic output of individual writers of the period. By the end of the century, sonnet fatigue had begun to set in, however, and the form fell into artistic and critical disfavor.
#Sonnet sequences were written in language plus
These favored the purity and correctness of the Petrarchan sonnet form and rhyme scheme (octave plus sestet) over the Shakespearean one (three quatrains plus a couplet).
#Sonnet sequences were written in language professional
The availability of the form to amateur and professional writers alike, and its susceptibility to the expression and treatment of miscellaneous subjects, led to concerted efforts to codify the sonnet.

The enthusiasm for sonnet writing on a huge variety of human and cultural experience found its counterpart in an expanding critical literature on the form. Chief among these was the revitalization of the Renaissance sonnet sequence, experimental examples of which abounded in the latter half of the 19th century. With the landmark publication of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese in 1850, the sonnet vogue was given new impetus in the Victorian period and became the site of some of the period’s most important poetic innovations. Most closely associated with the literary cultures of medieval Italy (Petrarch in particular) and the English Renaissance (Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare especially), the form enjoyed a rebirth in the late Romantic period, after two centuries of disuse, when it was championed and rejuvenated by William Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith. The sonnet was one of the most popular and significant poetic forms of the Victorian period.
