Shakespeare: The Sonnets

ISBN-13: 9781403992406 / Angielski / Twarda / 2007 / 272 str.

John Blades

Opis

This introduction reflects the recent upsurge in academic interest in Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse. Part 1 adopts a thematic approach to the Sonnets, guiding students through detailed textual analyses. Part 2 provides a clear critical and contextual framework for interpreting the poems, examining the development and characteristics of sonnet form, humanist themes and early modern print culture, concluding with a survey of the critical history of the Sonnets.

Spis treści

General Editor's Preface.- Introduction.- PART I: ANALYSING SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS.- Love (or what you will).- Time: to posterity and beyond.- Art: clever, very.- The Rival Poet(s): a lesson in tightropes?.- Fair's fair: The Dark Mistresses.- PART II: THE CONTEXT AND THE CRITICS.- Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet.- Humanism, Rhetoric and Poetry.- Readers and Writers.- Some Critical Responses to the Sonnets.- A Glossary of Some Rhetorical and Literary Terms.- Further Reading.- Index.

O autorze

JOHN BLADES has lectured in English Literature at the universities of Leeds and Durham, UK. His publications include critical studies of James Joyce and John Keats: The Poems and Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, also in the Analysing Texts series.

Blurb

The appearance in 1609 of Shakespeare's Sonnets is cloaked in mystery and controversy, while the poems themselves are masterpieces of silence and deception. The intervening four centuries have done little to diminish either their mystique or their appeal, and recent years have witnessed an upsurge in interest in these brilliant and contentious lyrics.

John Blades' penetrating study of the Sonnets is a highly lucid introduction to Shakespeare's subjects and poetic craft, involving detailed insights on the major themes, together with a comprehensive exploration of the Rival Poet and Dark Mistress sequences.

Shakespeare: The Sonnets:
- draws on an extensive range of sonnets, offering a line-by-line analysis that engages with the poems as masterworks in their own right, as well as registering their relationship with Shakespeare's dramas
- locates the Sonnets in their Elizabethan and humanist framework, with a survey of the history of the sonnet form and rhetorical conventions within the context of the early modern period
- concludes with a brief assessment of critical attitudes towards the Sonnets over the four centuries since their publication and an indepth examination of four important critics.

Providing students with the critical and analytical skills with which to approach the Sonnets, and featuring a helpful glossary and suggestions for further study, this fascinating book is an indispensable guide.