MACMILLAN The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)

The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion discusses how and why the sonnet appeals to Irish poets and has grown in popularity over the last century. Using a thematic approach, Tara Guissin-Stubbs argues for the significance of the Irish sonnet as a discrete entity within modern and contemporary poetry, and shows how the Irish sonnet has become a debating chamber for discussions concerning the relationship between Irish and British culture, poetry and gender, and revision and rebellion. The text reshapes the poetic and critical field, exploring canonical and non-canonical poems by male and female poets so as to challenge outmoded views of the thematic and formal limitations of the sonnet. Review “Tara Stubbs’s The Modern Irish Sonnet is an eloquent testament to the resilience and flexibility of the sonnet as a poetic form, this time in an Irish context, far from its medieval origins and its main traditions of operation. From Yeats to Kavanagh to Heaney, and onward to current practitioners, she shows it to have a remarkable fitness to the themes of Irish writing because of its capacity to express both the personal and the public. She shows too how this primarily male amatory tradition has been redirected for application to female and political experience while maintaining the characteristic tight structure of thesis-antithesis of which it is fundamentally composed. Across a wide range of writers and subjects she makes plain the paradox of the sonnet: how a defined form can transcend its restrictions and boundaries to meet an unlimited set of occasions. This is a comprehensive and compelling study of a strikingly rich poetic field.” ( Bernard O’Donoghue, Emeritus Fellow, Wadham College, University of Oxford, UK) From the Back Cover The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion discusses how and why the sonnet appeals to Irish poets and has grown in popularity over the last century. Using a thematic approach, Tara Guissin-Stubbs argues for the significance of the Irish sonnet as a discrete entity within modern and contemporary poetry, and shows how the Irish sonnet has become a debating chamber for discussions concerning the relationship between Irish and British culture, poetry and gender, and revision and rebellion. The text reshapes the poetic and critical field, exploring canonical and non-canonical poems by male and female poets so as to challenge outmoded views of the thematic and formal limitations of the sonnet. About the Author Tara Guissin-Stubbs is Associate Professor of English Literature at Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education, and the Dean of Kellogg College, Oxford University, UK. Her publications include American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–1955: the politics of enchantment (2013) and, with Doug Haynes, Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture (2017).