LITTLE SONGS

<div>In <i>Little Songs: Women Silence and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet</i> Amy Christine Billone analyzes the bond between lyric poetry and silence in women's sonnets ranging from the late eighteenth-century works of Charlotte Smith Helen Maria Williams and Anna Maria Smallpiece to Victorian texts by Elizabeth Barrett Christina Rossetti Isabella Southern and other lesser-known female poets. Although scholars acknowledge that women initiated the sonnet revival in England <i>Little Songs</i> is the only major study of nineteenth-century female sonneteers.</div> <div> </div> <div>Billone argues not that women's sonnets overcame silence in favor of lyrical speech during the nineteenth-century sonnet revival but rather that women simultaneously posited both muteness and volubility through style and theme. In opposition to criticism that stresses a modern shift from compensatory to non-consolatory poems of mourning Billone demonstrates how women invented contemporary elegiac poetics a century in advance.</div> <div> </div> <div>Adding to critical interest in the alliance between silence and literature this book offers a complex study of the overwhelming impact that silence makes not only on British women's poetry but also on the development of modern poetry and intellectual inquiry. Ultimately <i>Little Songs</i> illustrates how the turn away from the kind of silence that preoccupied nineteenth-century women poets introduced the start of twentieth-century thought.</div>