Modern Sonneteers, Hilary Mantel, and Critical Letters: A Triptych

This series of critiques serves to help demarcate, as well as add to, three specific literary forums. The first section of the book, Modern Sonneteers, discusses the genre plied by countless pens since Petrarch’s inception of the sonnet, honed by Shakespeare, and cultivated through Donne, Milton, Keats, and Wordsworth, among others, showing that it thrives still. The twentieth century yielded a second Sonnet Golden Age reminiscent of the first at the apex of the English Renaissance. Auden, Borges, Cummings, Larkin, and Stokes comprise part of the cadre of recent masters. The second part of the book, Homage to Hilary Mantel, comprises half-a-dozen pieces on a pre-eminent novelist of our time, whose most notable achievement, The Thomas Cromwell Trilogy, enshrines and reconceives an earlier time. In counterpoint to her historical fiction, literary analyses of Mantel are of necessity new. The essays gathered here shed light on her work, and spur further inquiry. The third section, Critical Letters in Critical Times, compasses pensees written to students, colleagues, and friends regarding Shakespeare, Borges, Nabokov, Wordsworth, Tartt, Schmidt, poetry and ethics, and the sublime. Most of this work is predicated on our unprecedented circumstances ensuing from the COVID-19 pandemic. It stands to reason that our literary analyses will be colored by our situation for some critical times to come.