Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays is the essential Sonnets anthology for our time. This important collection focuses exclusively on contemporary criticism of the Sonnets, reprinting three highly influential essays from the past decade and including sixteen original analyses by leading scholars in the field. The contributors' diverse approaches range from the new historicism to the new bibliography, from formalism to feminism, from reception theory to cultural materialism, and from biographical criticism to queer theory. In addition, James Schiffer's introduction offers a comprehensive survey of 400 years of criticism of these fascinating, enigmatic poems.
Table of Contents
Reading new life into Shakespeare's Sonnets : a survey of criticism / James Schiffer -- Editing as cultural formation : the sexing of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1993) / Peter Stallybrass -- The scandal of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1994) / Margreta de Grazia -- "Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd" : the politics of plotting Shakespeare's Sonnets (1996) / Heather Dubrow -- The silent speech of Shakespeare's Sonnets / George T. Wright -- Shakespeare's petrarchism / Gordon Braden -- "I am that I am" : Shakespeare's Sonnets and the economy of shame / Lars Engle -- "A dateless lively heat" : storing loss in the Sonnets / Joyce Sutphen -- Politics, heresy, and martyrdom in Shakespeare's Sonnet 124 and Titus Andronicus / John Klause -- The name of the rose : Christian figurality and Shakespeare's Sonnets / Lisa Freinkel -- What's the use? Or, the problemtaic of economy in Shakespeare's procreation Sonnets / Peter C. Herman -- Sonnets 71-74 : texts and contexts / Joseph Pequigney -- The matter of inwardness : Shakespeare's Sonnets / Michael Schoenfeldt -- "The dyer's hand" : the reproduction of coercion and blot in Shakespeare's Sonnets / Olga L. Valbuena -- Playing "the mother's part" : Shakespeare's Sonnets and early modern codes of maternity / Naomi J. Miller -- Be dark but not too dark : Shakespeare's dark lady as a sign of color / Marvin Hunt -- The Sonnets on trial : reconsidering The portrait of Mr. W.H. Rebecca Laroche -- I, you, he, she, and we : on the sexual politics of Shakespeare's Sonnets / Bruce R. Smith -- Sex without issue : sodomy, reproduction, and signification in Shakespeare's Sonnets / Valerie Traub -- "That which thou hast done" : Shakespeare's Sonnets and A lover's comlaint / Ilona Bell.