Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

This new study explores the poetic tradition of the love sonnet sequence in English as written by women. Natasha Distiller offers a unique contribution to the debate about gender and subjectivity by taking the subject of the sonnet as an analogue for the Lacanian subject. The book ranges from the development of Petrarchism in sixteenth-century English poetry, to sequences by Englishwomen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examines the work of Edna St Vincent Millay in the early twentieth century, and explores the Petrarchan inheritances in gangster rap today. Offering a distinctive theoretical scope, and speaking to scholars of feminist theory, of the sonnet, of women's literary history and of cultural studies, it engages with current and ongoing debates about the place of women's voices in Western literature and theories of subjectivity; about the development of a psychoanalytic literary critical vocabulary; and about the history of poetics in discourses of love.