Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence

Download or read book Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence written by John Holmes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1870, Dante Gabriel Rossetti published the first version of his sonnet sequence The House of Life. The next thirty years saw the greatest flourishing of the sonnet sequence since the 1590s. John Holmes's carefully researched and eloquent study illuminates how leading sonneteers, including the Rossettis, John Addington Symonds, Wilfrid Blunt and Augusta Webster, and their early twentieth-century successors Rosa Newmarch and Rupert Brooke, addressed the urgent questions of selfhood, religious belief and doubt, and sexual and national identity which troubled late Victorian England. Drawing on the heritage of the sonnet sequence, the poetic self-portraits they created are unsurpassed in their subtlety, complexity, courage, and honesty.