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Reclaiming The Female Melancholic Artist In Charlotte Smith’S Elegiac Sonnets, Emily Denommé

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Charlotte Smith is often considered a proto-Romantic poet, and her Elegiac Sonnets a precursor to the Romantic poetry of the next century. However, Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets is also heavily influenced by late-eighteenth century currents of thought, most especially the cult of sentiment that had extreme literary significance in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Additionally, changing perceptions of the melancholic artistic genius as a specifically male figure meant that Smith, as a poet for whom melancholy in Elegiac Sonnets was a central element of her artistry, had to demonstrate her claim, as a woman, to the space of the …