ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is built around three of the sonnet's most intriguing but rarely addressed paradoxes: it's puzzling reputation as the most demanding and rewarding, and yet also the most hackneyed and ridiculed of all poetic genres. In the early stages of research, the idea of the nineteenth-century sonnet as a mirror, reflective of contemporary debate, yet heavily speckled by its formidable Renaissance and Romantic prescriptive legacies, presented itself as a most felicitous metaphor to underpin the careful socio-cultural analysis of the genre that was undertaken. But it was not until the author was well underway researching the first sonnet sequence on list of case studies for this book, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, that the cracks developed into rapidly spreading fractures threatening to shatter my entire enterprise.
