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 Smith’s 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 Smith’s sonnets are constituted by three intertwined concerns: with tradition, place and the sonnet form itself, whereby the subjects of Smith’s 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 Smith’s verse engages more deeply with tradition than has hitherto been realised and revises our understanding not only of Smith’s career but also of the sonnet in eighteenth-century England.The book also illuminates Smith’s place in posterity, as a popular poet - influencing figures ranging from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Const