The Sonnet in Ruins: Time and the Nation in 1599
Griffiths, Huw
Early Modern Culture, No. 6 (2007)
Abstract
With this essay, I want to think about an English history whose destiny is not, after all, monarchical, anti-republican or insular. I will be reading for an England that will no longer have been England, that will have been anti-monarchical, pro-republican, cosmopolitan. The implausibility of this conjectured history is what I will be working towards and, particularly, the knowledge of this impossible history as it could have been contained within the form of the sonnet. So, an alternative history of England and also an alternative history of the sonnet, where subjects are replaced by citizens and self-expression by public discourse. Or if these alternatives are not, in the end, possible, an England that is monarchist, anti-republican and insular but all of those things quite otherwise.
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