The Sonnets: The State of Play

by Crawforth, Hannah; Scott-Baumann, Elizabeth; Thompson, Ann; Orlin, Lena Cowen

• ISBN13: 9781474277136
• ISBN10: 1474277136
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2017-06-01
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare

Summary

Shakespeare's Sonnets both generate and demonstrate many of today's most pressing debates about Shakespeare and poetry. They explore history and aesthetics, gender and society, time and memory, and continue to invite divergent responses from critics and poets. This freeze-frame volume showcases the range of current debate and ideas surrounding these still startling poems. Each chapter has been carefully selected for its originality and relevance to the needs of students, teachers, and researchers. Key themes and topics covered include:
Textual issues and editing the sonnets
Reception, interpretation and critical history of the sonnets
The place of the sonnets in teaching
Critical approaches and close reading
Memorialisation and monument-making
Contemporary poetry and the Sonnets
All the essays offer new perspectives and combine to give readers an up-to-date understanding of what is exciting and challenging about Shakespeare's Sonnets. The approach, based on an individual poetic form, reflects how the sonnets are most commonly studied and taught.

Author Biography

Hannah Crawforth is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at King's College London, UK.
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann is Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at King's College London, UK.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction;
2. 'Injurious Time': Proleptic Loss and Conditional Ruin in Shakespeare's Sonnets;
3. Shakespeare's Sonnets as Event;
4. 'Desire is Pattern': Shakespeare's Sonnets, Sequence, and the History of Meaning;
5. 'Our brains beguiled': Ecclesiastes and Temporal Discontinuity in Sonnet 59; 6. 'TO.THE.ONLY.BEGETTER. . . . Mr. W. [S.]';
7. 'Love is not love': Teaching Poetic Ambiguity through Shakespeare's Sonnets
8. The scar on the face: Ted Hughes, his late wife and Shakespeare's Sonnets;
9. Re-gifting Some Sonnets of Late;
10. Infinite Finitude: Living and Dying in the Sonnets;
11. Unfulfilled Imperatives in Shakespeare's Sonnets;
12. Promising Eternity in the 1609 Quarto;
13. A lingering farewell: Sonnet 87;
14. Afterword
Notes;
Index