Marianne Van Remoortel. Lives of the Sonnet, 1787-1895: Genre, Gender and Criticism. Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6934-0. Price: US$99.95/£55.00

The title of Marianne Van Remoortel's ambitious book, Lives of the Sonnet, 1787-1895: Genre, Gender and Criticism, initially puzzled me with its first word. Did "lives" refer to the poets who took up the sonnet form throughout the long nineteenth century or to those critics suggested by the last word of the title? The book’s introduction offers a more complicated and more interesting third possibility: Van Remoortel says that she takes an "inclusive socio-textual approach" to the sonnet form, treating gender as a "defining feature of genre" (7). The word "lives" in her title also points to Van Remoortel's sustained attention to the sonnet's status and cultural reception both throughout the nineteenth century and within more recent literary criticism. Many book-length studies of the nineteenth-century sonnet, such as John Holmes’s Dante Gabriel Rosetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence: Sexuality, Belief and the Self (2005) or Amy Billone’s Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (2007) track the sonnet’s use by selected poets in order to map a particular kind of history. Joseph Phelan’s The Nineteenth Century Sonnet (2005) takes a thematic approach to the form, looking at how the sonnet was used for political, devotional, or amatory purposes. In contrast, Van Remoortel’s study deliberately eschews a cohesive or progressive account of the sonnet's development in the period in order to map its varied deployment, suggesting by its very structure that how we narrate the sonnet's "life" is as important as the poets and texts we include within that story. The six chapters each explore different uses and contexts for the sonnet form, including its appearance in popular journalism, as the target and vehicle for literary parody, and as a flexible form for new kinds of poetic sequencing. Unfortunately, Van Remoortel’s study does not offer a clear theoretical model of gendered genre or of the social text that would sufficiently ground her approach, leaving it to the reader to draw connections from one chapter to another. The book opens with a study of sonnets published in the late eighteenth-century London newspaper The World. Van Remoortel identifies the sonnet as only one of an array of poetic forms (including odes, elegies, and songs) that readers would have seen in the pages of the World in 1787. She examines typographical conventions, dedications, titles, and the juxtaposition of the newspaper's sonnets with advertisements and gossip columns to demonstrate how the conventions of the amatory sonnet became commodified within material print culture. Of particular interest is an example of an amatory sonnet ("In a deep sequester'd grove") printed in February 1787 and signed "Maria," which was then reprinted in September 1787 under the name "Edwin." Van Remoortel suggests that the amatory sonnet tradition's demarcation of the role of poet and idealized love object becomes destabilized and performative within TheWorld's pages. One of Van Remoortel's important arguments about how the sonnet functioned throughout the long nineteenth century is that although the form is one of the most clearly defined in terms of number of lines and rhyme pattern, the cultural significance of the sonnet extends far beyond poems that meet those criteria. Her chapter on the Della Cruscan poets and William Gifford's satiric critique of them in The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795) argues that "the 'sonnet' often operated as an autonomous satirical label, leading, as it were, a 'secret life' outside the genre's traditional masculine 14-line boundaries" (35). She traces how all kinds of poems beyond the 14-line form were labeled sonnets to mark their perceived feminine qualities, in both satirical and more serious critical accounts. Eighteenth-century novels …