Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Form, Place and Tradition in the Late Eighteenth Century

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.

This book offers the first full-length study of Charlotte Smiths Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its place in multiple ways in literary history as a work celebrated for making it new, yet deeply engaged with the literary past. It argues that Smiths sonnets are constituted by three intertwined concerns: with tradition, place and the sonnet form itself, whereby the subjects of Smiths sonnets across birds, rivers, the sea, plants and flowers are bound up with the literary context in which she wrote. Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet shows that Smiths verse engages more deeply with tradition than has hitherto been realised and revises our understanding not only of Smiths career but also of the sonnet in eighteenth-century England. The book also illuminates Smiths place in posterity, as a popular poet influencing figures ranging from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Constable who was subsequently obscured in literary history. It reveals the complex processes underpinning Smiths reception and paradoxical position from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and shows that the appropriation of place itself was an important way in which aspects of literary tradition have been negotiated and understood by Smith, her predecessors, contemporaries and successors.