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Chapter 3 - Recollection and Pre-emptive Resurrection in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

from Part I - The Arts of Remembering Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2022

William E. Engel
Affiliation:
University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee
Rory Loughnane
Affiliation:
University of Kent, Canterbury
Grant Williams
Affiliation:
Carleton University, Ottawa
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Summary

The Sonnets have been a long-standing object of interest for scholars of early modern memory. However, this essay turns attention away from cultural or collective memory to questions of individual recollection. The chapter explores the poetic speaker’s efforts to understand how his own memory functions and how he might influence the memories of those to whom his poems are addressed. In doing so, the discussion takes as its focus how recollection is co-constitutive of erotic pleasure in the poems. Upon analysis, it is found that the Sonnets overtly tie mental recollection to the revivification of bodily pleasures. The Sonnets constitute a project of bringing the speaker’s past and future loves into his present. The power of the speaker’s desire is thus able to enable a resurrection of lost beloveds in lyric time.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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