The Life in the Sonnets [Hardcover]

A passionately argued account of the value of experience and emotion in reading Shakespeare's sonnets and of the importance of reading poetry aloud.David Fuller is Emeritus Professor of English in the University of Durham, UK. From 2002 to 2007 he was the University's Orator. He trained as a musicologist, and has written on a range of literary topics from Medieval to Modern. He is the author of Blake's Heroic Argument (1988), James Joyce's 'Ulysses' (1992), Signs of Grace (with David Brown, 1995). He has edited Tamburlaine the Great (1998) for the Clarendon Press complete works of Marlowe, co-edited (with Patricia Waugh) The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (OUP, 1999), and edited Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose (Longman, 2000, 2008).

This is a passionate book: a book about passion in literature, passion for literature, and passion in critical writing. David Fuller reminds us of the emotional and sensual pleasures of poetry and reintroduces terms such as enjoyment , engagement and feeling to our critical vocabularies. This book will deepen the reader's engagement not just with Shakespeare's sonnets but with all kinds of art - written, acoustic and visual - as Fuller shows us how to bring personal experience to bear on critical analysis. Laurie Maguire, Professor of English Literature at at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK

This slim and easy-to-read volume&concludes with a brief coda that pulls things together quite nicely. Rudolph P. Almasy, West Virginia University,Sixteenth Century Journal

1. Prologue: A Discipline without Boundaries / 2. Imagining Feelings / 3. Dwelling in the Words: Reading Aloud / References / Index