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  • Lives of the Sonnet, 1787–1895: Genre, Gender and Criticism by Marianne Van Remoortel
  • Amy Billone (bio)
Lives of the Sonnet, 1787–1895: Genre, Gender and Criticism, by Marianne Van Remoortel; pp. 204. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011, s55.00, $99.95.

Marianne Van Remoortel’s Lives of the Sonnet, 1787–1895: Genre, Gender and Criticism enhances and updates nineteenth-century sonnet scholarship. One of Van Remoortel’s goals in her book is to highlight and repair “significant lacunae or blind-spots in the existing scholarship” (5). As Van Remoortel shows, these blind-spots ironically serve a [End Page 559] necessary function in our attempt to comprehend the role of gender and genre within particular moments in literary history. Closing our eyes to certain elements makes us open them to others. Van Remoortel’s work in this way draws from previous scholarship not by negating it but instead by supplementing and augmenting it.

Whereas Jennifer Ann Wagner focused only on male sonneteers in her influential book A Moment’s Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century English Sonnet (1996) and more recent critics such as Joseph Phelan studied different aspects of the sonnet than its “gendered allegiances” in The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (2005) (5), I complemented the androcentric or gender-neutral emphasis of earlier accounts in Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (2007) by investigating the stylistic and thematic appeal that silence held for nineteenth-century British female sonneteers. Instead of following the paths led by her immediate predecessors by writing a literary history of “the second life … of the sonnet” (Wagner qtd. in Van Remoortel 4), “the sonnet across the whole of the nineteenth century” (Phelan qtd. in Van Remoortel 4), or “England’s nineteenth-century sonnet revival” (Billone qtd. in Van Remoortel 4), Van Remoortel aims “to supplement” other critics’ “groundbreaking work by illustrating the many different lives led by the genre in the long nineteenth century” (4).

As she examines those lives, Van Remoortel conceptualizes gender in an insightful, productive way. Rather than focusing on gender “as a socio-cultural property of the author,” Van Remoortel exposes the way that “the generic label of ‘sonnet’ itself became a highly connotative marker of gender in the last decades of the eighteenth century.” She argues that the gendering of the sonnet operated independently of authorial sex. For this reason, her interest in the long nineteenth century is not due to her effort to prove women poets’ growing claim to authorship through their radical use of the sonnet form; rather, Van Remoortel is interested in the long nineteenth century “because the countless unwritten ‘microhistories’ of the sonnet in this period force us to revise some of our deeply ingrained conceptions about genre, periodization and canonization.” Her approach is thus not author-centered but is instead “more inclusive” and “socio-textual” (6).

By turning her attention away from the poets themselves, Van Remoortel is able to interrogate the commodification of the sonnet during the nineteenth-century sonnet revival. She shows the ways in which both male and female sonneteers constructed their work in response to the contexts in which it was consumed and interpreted by a lively, engaged audience. For example, she makes thought-provoking comments about the London World, which displayed quotidian updates on four fourcolumn full-sheet pages. Van Remoortel’s analysis of the World clarifies the double status of the sonnet in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: its simultaneous pretensions of literary worth and its vulnerability to satire. Like other brief verse forms—including “odes, verses, epitaphs, elegies, songs, epigrams, stanzas, fables, serenades, epistles, eclogues, extempores, ballads and charades” (10)—sonnets were attractive to the World because of the spatial restrictions of newspaper publication. The self-importance of the sonnet form was contextualized and indeed rendered suspect by everything that appeared on the pages around and alongside it—the daily gossip, advertisements, and other economic imperatives of newspaper publication.

In the first half of Lives of the Sonnet, Van Remoortel explores the marketing of sonnets through periodical publication in the late eighteenth century. She posits [End Page 560] that the sonnet was feminized at this time because of the entrance...

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