Little songs : women, silence, and the nineteenth-century sonnet / Amy Christine Billone.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Billone, Amy Christine, 1972-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Southern, Isabella J.

Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 1830-1894.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1806-1861.

Smith, Charlotte, 1749-1806.

Sonnets, English--History and criticism.

Sonnets, English.

English poetry--Women authors--History and criticism.

English poetry.

English poetry--Women authors.

English poetry--19th century--History and criticism.

English poetry--18th century--History and criticism.

Silence in literature.

Smith, Charlotte, 1749-1806--Criticism and interpretation.

Smith, Charlotte.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1806-1861--Criticism and interpretation.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett.

Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 1830-1894--Criticism and interpretation.

Rossetti, Christina Georgina.

Southern, Isabella J--Criticism and interpretation.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

x, 199 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Columbus : Ohio State University Press, [2007]

Summary:

In Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet, Amy Christine Billone analyzes the bond between lyric poetry and silence in women's sonnets ranging from the late eighteenth-century works of Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Anna Maria Smallpiece to Victorian texts by Elizabeth Barrett. Christina Rossetti, Isabella Southern, and other, lesser-known female poets. Although scholars acknowledge that women initiated the sonnet revival in England, Little Songs is the only major study of nineteenth-century female sonneteers.

Billone argues not that women's sonnets overcame silence in favor of lyrical speech during the nineteenth-century sonnet revival, but rather that women simultaneously posited both muteness and volubility through style and theme. In opposition to criticism that stresses a modern shift from compensatory to non-consolatory poems of mourning, Billone demonstrates how women invented contemporary elegiac poetics a century in advance. Adding to critical interest in the alliance between silence and literature, this book offers a complex study of the overwhelming impact that silence makes, not only on British women's poetry, but also on the development of modern poetry and intellectual inquiry, Ultimately. Little Songs illustrates how the turn away from the kind of silence that preoccupied nineteenth-century women poets introduced the start of twentieth-century thought.

Contents:

Silence, gender, and the sonnet revival

Breaking "the silent Sabbath of the grave" : romantic women's sonnets and the "mute arbitress" of grief

"In silence like to death" : Elizabeth Barrett's sonnet turn

Sing again : Christina Rossetti and the music of silence

"Silence, 'tis more cruel than the grave!" : Isabella Southern and the turn to the twentieth century

Women's renunciation of the sonnet form.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 185-191) and index.

ISBN:

9780814210420

0814210422

9780814291221

0814291228

OCLC:

74458882