J. Phelan 
The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet 

What was the appeal of ‘the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground’ to Romantic and Victorian poets? How did a form which had fallen into disuse in the early eighteenth-century become a central and enduring part of nineteenth-century poetry? This study traces the history and development of the sonnet throughout the nineteenth-century, examining the work of Wordsworth, Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith and a number of other key canonical and non-canonical writers.

Table of Content

Introduction The Wordsworthian Sonnet Revival: Poems in Two Volumes (1807) ‘Transcripts of the Private Heart’: The Sonnet and Autobiography The Political Sonnet The Devotional Sonnet ‘Illegal Attachments’: The Amatory Sonnet Sequence ‘Thought’s Pure Diamond’: The Sonnet at the End of the Century Notes Bibliography Index

About the author

JOSEPH PHELAN is Senior Lecturer in English at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He is the editor of
Clough: Selected Poems (1995) and the author of a number of articles on nineteenth-century literature and culture.