Sonnet

Abstract: Between i640 and i66o, English colonists in Virginia developed a legal system of chattel slavery out of the English hierarchical class system of indentured servitude. Bondage became marked by distinctions of skin color defined by the condition of the mother. Kim F. Hall's important book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, traces the rhetorical preparation for that legal distinction in the conquest of a racialized dark lady enacted in travel narratives, plays, and masques, but primarily in English lyric poetry. Hall grounds her analysis in two powerful and disparate strands of investigation: first, the historical analysis of the languages of race by Winthrop D. Jordan in White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550o-182 (Chapel Hill, i968) and, second, the feminist analysis of gender developed from Nancy Vickers's influential work on the dismemberment of the beloved implicit in the Petrarchan blazon ("'The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's Lucrece," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman [New York, I9851) and from Parker's own investigation of the rhetorical challenge of gender difference in New World texts (Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property [London, I9871). Hall situates herself as a black feminist reader confronting the canonical texts of European elite culture. She reads with scrupulous care and a full awareness of the consequences of figures of speech. She has two critical commonplaces to confront: the belief that the English were unfamiliar with African complexions and the belief that the black-white binarisms of Elizabethan poetry were not racialized categories. Hall's work on English elite investment in the slave trade powerfully challenges such narrow assertions. The familiarity and availability of tropes of race is clear in the figure of an enslaved black man in chains that the College of Heralds granted as an augmentation to John Hawkins's coat of arms after his second slave voyage in I562. Heraldic emblems are riddles to be deciphered; the reference to the racial characteristics of a African male body is simple. Hall also has the more delicate task of tracing the process of race in the language and definition of beauty in lyric poetry. The core of Hall's book is the argument over the lyric. She exposes the links between "blackness and economics in the English sonnet" (p. 66), primarily Sir Philip Sidney's. The dynamic of the poet's transformation of his dark lady into white is a mechanism that employs not simply neoplatonic love poetry but also "cultural values regarding the proper 'use' of foreign materia, both economic and discursive" (p. 71). Hall organizes the chapter around an analysis of four different tropes: the racialized light/dark dichotomy of the Elizabethan sonnet cycles, the colonialist nexus of beauty and cosmetics, the problems of sunburn with the implicit anxieties over climate embedded therein, and finally the binary of race in the Song of Songs.

Abstract: Introduction. Editorial Principles. Acknowledgements. Inventory of Manuscripts. Abbreviations. RICHARD PRICE (1723-91) from A Discourse on the Love of our Country 1789) On Representation Prospects for Reform. THOMAS WARTON (1728-90) from Poems (1777) Sonnet IX. To the River Lodon. EDMUND BURKE (1729-97) from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) On Obscurity from Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) On Englishness Society as a Contract. WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800) from The Task (1785) Crazy Kate (Book I) On Slavery (Book II) The Winter Evening (Book IV) from Works , ed. Robert Southey (15 vols., 1835-7) Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce, or The Slave-Trader in the Dumps. THOMAS PAINE (1737-1809) from Common Sense (1776) Of the Origin and Design of Government in General from The Rights of Man , Part I (1791) Freedom of Posterity On Revolution from The Rights of Man , Part II (1792) Republicanism. ANNA SEWARD (1742-1809) from Sonnets (1799) Sonnet VII. MARY ALCOCK (c.1742-98) from Poems (1799) Instructions, Supposed to be Written in Paris, for the Mob in England. ANNA LAETITIA BARBAULD (1743-1825) from Poems (1773) A Summer Evening's Meditation from Poems (1792) Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq., on the Refection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade from Works (1825) The Rights of Woman from Monthly Magazine , 7 (1799) To Mr Coleridge. HANNAH MORE (1745-1833) from Sacred Dramas (1782) Sensibility: A Poetical Epistle to the Hon. Mrs. Boscawen (extract) The Sorrows of Yamba, or the Negro Woman's Lamentation (c.1795) (published by Hannah More as a Cheap Repository broadside, but not written by her). CHARLOTTE SMITH (1749-1806) from Elegiac Sonnets (1784) Sonnet V. To the South Downs from Elegiac Sonnets (1786) Sonnet XXXII. To Melancholy. Written on the Banks of the Arun, October 1785.

Abstract: No other woman in world history has been of such compulsive interest as Elizabeth Tudor. While the rest of the 16th century Europe was subject to the bloodshed of religious war, Tudor peace brought England its great flowering of the arts. Central to that flowering was the enigmatic legend of the Queen herself, a myth deliberately created and sustained over four decades by public spectacle and courtly chivalry, by private sonnet and official oration.

Abstract: Curran here confronts the popular stereotype that the Romantics either accepted or rejected previously established literary genres. He proposes rather that they adapted traditional poetic forms to suit their own democratic, secular, and sceptical ethos. This artistic merger of traditional genre with the tenets of Romanticism was a fruitful one, not only resulting in the revival of the ode and the sonnet, but also leading to the imaginative rethinking of major forms like the pastoral, the epic, and the romance which gave the movement its name.