The Sonnet

by Stephen Regan

Overview

The Sonnet provides a comprehensive study of one of the oldest and most popular forms of poetry, widely used by Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, and still used today by poets such as Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, and Carol Ann Duffy. This book combines a broad historical overview of the sonnet with detailed critical analysis to show how the sonnet has achieved its special status and popularity among poets in Britain, Ireland, and America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192893079
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/28/2019
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.50(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Stephen Regan is a Lecturer in Modern Poetry at Royal Holloway, University of London.

He is the founding editor of The Year s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Blackwell) and the editor of The Politics of Pleasure: Aesthetics and Cultural Theory (Open University Press, 1992).

He has also edited The Eagleton Reader (Blackwell, 1998). Among his publications on twentieth-century poetry are Philip Larkin (Macmillan, 1992) and the New Casebook on Larkin (1997). His most recent book is The Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Critical Reader (Routledge, 2001).

Table of Contents

Introduction1. The Renaissance2. Shakespeare3. Milton4. The Romantic Revival of the Sonnet5. Victorian Sonnet Sequences6. The Irish Sonnet7. The American Sonnet8. The Modern SonnetConclusion

Editorial Reviews

"There is no better close reader of the formal effects of sonnet structure, sound, syntax, rhyme, and rhythm. He exfoliates their localised effects with such deft care and artfulness ... Regan manages somehow to hold our attention throughout and focus his interpretive energies so that each sonnet gets its due and reveals its singular qualities. To read The Sonnet is to have the eye trained to see more, even in sonnets of well-worn familiarity. From now on, whenever I teach or write about sonnets, the first question I will ask myself is: what did Regan have to say?" — Joshua Reid, The Spenser Review

From the Publisher