'How elastic is form?': the modern lives of women's sonnets

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My research will address the form of the sonnet in the modern period, and its intersections with gender. Via case studies of the sonnets of several prolific female poets from the 19th to the 21st century, I will examine the extent to which the sonnet has come to be defined by cultural association rather than prosody, arguing that the sonnet now represents a mode of lyric thought, deeply entangled with issues of gender and subjectivity. Recent scholarship on the modern sonnethas addressed the form from a number of marginal viewpoints, including race (Timo Muller) and Irish nationality (Tara Guissin-Stubbs). My research would add to this emergent field by considering the sonnet form through the lens of gender. Rosalind Smith and Amy Christine Billone have studied early modern and nineteenth-century women's sonnets;my research would continue this feminist scholarship into the modern period. Moreover, scholarship has formerly taken the sonnet's prosodic definition as a given: my research would contribute to study of the sonnet form itself by addressing it from a formalist perspective indebted to Caroline Levine, considering how its prosodic form intersects with social forms(i.e. gender), to argue that the sonnet has become a culturally defined form.