Beyond this subtly revealing adjustment in diction, the placement of the lines adapted from "By Way of Remembrance" within "Monna
Innominata" erodes the conclusive prominence that they hold in their original context.
element of "Monna
Innominata": the subtitle presents the
Each precursor imagines the power differential between speaker and addressee differently; Monna
Innominata's speaker claims equality with her lover, while the speakers in Sonnets from the Portuguese and Brother and Sister each occupy a subordinate position, albeit for different reasons.
In her essay "Monna
Innominata and Sonnets from the Portuguese: Sonnet Traditions and Spiritual Trajectories," Stone convincingly illustrates "the inveterate nature of the gendered paradigms that both poets sought to deconstruct" (The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, ed.
In "Ideal Visions: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti," Straub argues that by contrast Christina forged a new and egalitarian Dantean/ Petrarchan persona in "Monna
Innominata," which "manage[d] to move beyond the moments of stagnation ...
77-79) begins with a comparison to Mary Wroth's sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) and concludes with a brief treatment of its connections with Christina Rossetti's Monna
Innominata (1881), the subject of several earlier studies.
House of Life and Christina's Monna
Innominata and Later Life, is
In "The Transcendental Tendency in Christina Rossetti's Poetry of Love and Devotion," for example, Waldman explores Rossetti's lyrics of sublimity and sublimation, and contrasts the "desperate" candor of her sonnet sequence "Monna
Innominata" with "Later Life"'s "innovation of linguistic strategies," which alternates rational discourse with a Lacanian "imaginary." She also finds parallels between Lacan's views on gender and Rossetti's belief "that gender is an arbitrary and contingent element of human society" (p.
A chapter on "Monna
Innominata" notes the sequence's intricate responses to Dante and Petrarch's love poetry, and argues that it was "so successful because its network of allusions allows it to act simultaneously as tribute and critique of both the motivations of its speaker and the poets of the past" (p.
We witness it not only in Goblin Market: it permeates her works, (4) prose as well as poetry, from the 1850s--one immediately thinks of her juvenile prose tale, Maude, as well as poems such as The Convent Threshold and "An Apple-Gathering," for instance--to her last major poems, including the justly admired Monna
Innominata sonnet of sonnets.
In "Monna
Innominata: Alexa Wilding," finally, Allan and Page Life tell us something of the life and character of the woman who became Rossetti's chief paid model, and whose face appears frequently in Rossetti's later canvasses.
While critics have explored the overt intertexuality of Christina Rossetti's sonnet sequence, "Monna
Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets" (1881), few have considered EBB's earlier subversion of the traditional courtly-love sonnet.