Capturing the moment: A cultural history of the Victorian sonnet (David Gray, Alexander Smith, Sydney Dobell, Roger Fenton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

Although generally ignored by standard literary histories of the Victorian period, the sonnet form was widely used by nineteenth-century poets and recognized by their readers as having particular uses and significance. In investigating the cultural significance of the values attributed to the sonnet form, I put forward an historically specific account of the genre that complicates traditional literary histories of the period and of the sonnet.; Chapter 1 describes the extensive field of sonnet discourse constituted in nineteenth-century literary criticism and especially in the many anthologies of sonnets published throughout the period. This field of discourse shaped the meaning of the sonnet form through its definitions of the sonnet's form and rules, its different national histories of the sonnet, and its construction of the sonnet's readers. The second part of Chapter 1 examines how the material design--organization, editorial apparatus, typeface, and page design--of selected sonnet anthologies shaped the sonnet's history.; The first part of Chapter 2 examines the contents of the sonnet anthologies in relation to the canons they constitute as well as to our own. The Victorian sonnet has largely been obscured from our contemporary view because the sonnet was seen as documenting the experience of its writer, whether real or imagined, and was read biographically. Part II of Chapter 2 offers a case study of how David Gray deliberately drew on the documentary and revelatory functions of the sonnet form to create a image of himself that would conform to existing cultural tropes of the dying young poet based on Keats's life story.; Chapter 3 investigates more broadly the relation of the sonnet form to history, and to the modernity of Victorian experience. I propose reading the sonnet and photography as analogous Victorian technologies of representation in order to show that the sonnet form could, like the photograph, circulate as a commodifiable moment of perception. Victorian sonnets and photographs filled similar needs: souvenirs of travel, portraits of family members and famous persons, and allegorical or sentimental scenes for reflection. The second part of Chapter 3 offers a case study of how the memorializing and documentary qualities of the sonnet and the photograph were used to record the historical experience of the Crimean war. Both Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell's Sonnets on the War and Roger Fenton's Photographs from the Crimea package public events for individual consumption as souvenirs or private memorials.; Chapter 4 draws together historical and thematic threads from the entire project in a reading of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The House of Life. I read this work as a collection, rather than a sequence, choosing to emphasize Rossetti's understanding of the sonnet as formally commensurate with the larger exchange economy that surrounded the production and consumption of works of art in an age of mechanical reproduction.