Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition »

This new study explores the poetic tradition of the love sonnet sequence in English as written by women from 1621-1931. It connects this tradition to ways of speaking desire in public in operation today, and to the development of theories of subjectivity in Western culture.

Acknowledgements     vi
Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference     1
Petrarchism and Psychoanalysis     21
Petrarchism in Early Modern England     43
The Petrarchism of Mary Wroth     80
Strategies of Legitimation 1796-1881     98
Queering the Petrarchan Subject: The Poetry of Rosa Newmarch     135
Edna St Vincent Millay and the Dissident Petrarchan Subject     153
Conclusion: Petrarchism Today     173
Notes     182
Works Cited     197
Index     211