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The secret life of the Della Cruscan sonnet: William Gifford's Baviad and Maeviad.(Critical essay)

From: The Modern Language Review  |  Date: 4/1/2007  |  Author: Van Remoortel, Marianne

In the past few decades, feminist critics have conveniently regarded the sonnet as a fundamentally masculine genre, as a bulwark of male subjectivity and a site of female objectification. This essay argues that the gendered allegiances of the nineteenth-century sonnet are much more complicated, and originate in the feminization that this male-dominated genre underwent in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Taking William Gifford's critique on the Della Cruscan poets in his ...

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