Description
Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.
This book offers the first full-length study of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its ‘place’ – in multiple ways – in literary history as a work celebrated for ‘making it new’, yet deeply engaged with the literary past. It argues that Smith’s sonnets are constituted by three intertwined concerns: with tradition, place and the sonnet form itself, whereby the subjects of Smith’s sonnets – across birds, rivers, the sea, plants and flowers – are bound up with the literary context in which she wrote. Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet shows that Smith’s verse engages more deeply with tradition than has hitherto been realised and revises our understanding not only of Smith’s career but also of the sonnet in eighteenth-century England. The book also illuminates Smith’s place in posterity, as a popular poet – influencing figures ranging from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Constable – who was subsequently obscured in literary history. It reveals the complex processes underpinning Smith’s reception and paradoxical position from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and shows that the appropriation of place itself was an important way in which aspects of literary tradition have been negotiated and understood by Smith, her predecessors, contemporaries and successors.
Trade Review‘[Roberts] offers fascinating readings of some of Smith’s now long-forgotten precursors, placing the poet within a lively and constantly evolving English sonnet tradition.’
Claire Knowles, European Romantic Review
‘Roberts provides something new and even overdue with her meticulous accounting of the nine editions of Smith’s name-making Elegiac Sonnets and Smith’s evolution as a poet over the corresponding sixteen years… [Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet] is valuable as a thorough and authoritative account of Smith’s influential poetry, with (as promised in the title) broader implications for understanding place and form in Romanticism, particularly in her proposal that the sonnet is an importantly Romantic poetic form.’ Lawrence Evalyn, Eighteenth-Century Fiction
'Roberts provides something new and even overdue with her meticulous accounting of the nine editions of Smith’s name-making Elegiac Sonnets and Smith’s evolution as a poet over the corresponding sixteen years… The monograph is valuable as a thorough and authoritative account of Smith’s influential poetry.' Lawrence Evalyn, Northeastern University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
1 The Eighteenth-Century Sonnet
2 Tradition
3 Innovation
4 Wider Prospect
5 Botany to Beachy Head
Bibliography
