Augusta Webster Writing Motherhood in the Dramatic Monologue and the Sonnet Sequence

Gregory, Melissa Valiska

doi:10.1353/vp.2011.0005

Cited by 35 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 13 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As Melissa Valiska Gregory interprets the poem, it "contains the seeds of a wide-ranging social critique, one that implicates the ideological structures of marriage itself." 18 In these three Webster poems, however, there is no auditor for the speaker's critique, and many women's monologues portray their speakers as having limited authority and little success in expressing their grievances publicly. 19 Of course, women authors are able to articulate such grievances publicly, through their poetry, but they do so from behind a mask.…”

Section: Dramatic Monologuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Poetic genres are not predetermined, unchanging categories but collections of texts that are perceived to share features. When we recognize generic categories as malleable, we are more likely to welcome a wider range of texts and authors, including women writers, into the literary canon. And a more inclusive canon leads to a wider recognition of formal shapes and rhetorical effects within each genre. Studying poetry by women gives us a fuller understanding of the constraints and potentials of each genre. Of course, Victorian women writers were constrained not only by literary conventions but also by social conventions and institutional inequalities. Isobel Armstrong has explored the ways female poets both worked within and critiqued conventions of gendered experience, but she also warns, "a concentration on moments of overt protest can extract the content of a direct polemic about women's condition in a way which retrieves the protest, but not the poem." 1 In what follows, I trace women poets' protests while attending to poetic form in experiments with genre, from the sonnet to the epic. As we shall see, women poets often protest social limitations while pushing against generic constraints, finding previously untapped potential in a genre, or offsetting the limitations of one genre by incorporating the strengths of another. Sonnet SequencesA sonnet is made up of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter connected through an intricate rhyme scheme (though in Modern Love [1862], George Meredith expands his sonnets to sixteen lines). The sonnet flourished in Elizabethan England, retreated in the eighteenth century, and reemerged with new subject matter in the Romantic period with the success of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets (1784). In Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB) returned the sonnet sequence to a focus on love, yet she inverted or reimagined traditional Petrarchan conceits. Whereas in sonnet sequences by Petrarch, Dante, Sidney, and Spenser, 13

show abstract

Section: Dramatic Monologuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Webster, Augusta

Houston

2015

The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Augusta Webster was an accomplished translator and prolific poet who was well regarded by Victorian readers. Webster wrote in many genres: she published translations of Prometheus Bound and Medea , seven books of poetry, two novels, three plays, and numerous essays and reviews. In addition to her literary career, Webster was politically active in feminist causes. Many of her poems focus on women's lives and experience. Today she is best known as the author of “A Castaway,” a dramatic monologue about a prostitute, and for a posthumous sequence of sonnets celebrating maternal love.

show abstract

Webster, Augusta

Luu¹

2019

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Augusta Webster Writing Motherhood in the Dramatic Monologue and the Sonnet Sequence

Cited by 35 publications

References 13 publications

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry

Webster, Augusta

Webster, Augusta

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About