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Distortion, Aggression, and Sex in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 53, Number 1, Winter 2013
- pp. 91-115
- 10.1353/sel.2013.0000
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay argues that the features of poetic style that have been criticized as abstract and repetitious in Mary Wroth’s sonnets should be considered in the context of a punk aesthetic: one that eschews a sense of formal mastery, includes syntactic breaks as distortion, includes the deliberately ugly, uses a pared-down and telegraphic vocabulary, and displays aggressive eroticism, albeit eroticism reliant on a set of idiosyncratic keywords.