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This newly revised study examines thematic elements in Christina Rossettis poetry in order to celebrate and explain an important, undervalued writer and her remarkable artistic quest to achieve an original voice. Critics rightly applaud Rossettis metrical craftsmanship and song-like lyrical phrasings, but over-attention to formal felicities can impede proper interpretation of content. Through detailed readings of selected poems, this book demonstrates that Rossettis rigorously controlled use of language and innovative symbolism combine to create radical, hidden inter-textual levels of meaning beyond those attainable via biographical decoding, making her a singular bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. From earliest secular interactions with Romantic and Tractarian thought, through Goblin Market (1862) and The Princes Progress (1866), Rossettis verse resists straightforward interpretation by subtly interrogating and subverting the patriarchal traditions of writing that it simultaneously extends: love lyric, fairy tale, quest myth, and sonnet. Persuasively constructing a case for the inability of male-ordained poetics to cope with the expression of active female identity, Monna Innominata (1881) deconstructs lyric tradition, casting together medieval, renaissance, Romantic and Victorian ideologies. This groundbreaking sonnet cycle disturbs poetic conventions and forms the most concentrated, sustained demonstration of the struggle to articulate the female self to be found in Rossettis oeuvre, perhaps in literary history. The painful sense of irresolution and despair pervading Monna Innominata sheds important light upon Christina Rossettis exclusive production of devotional literature during her final years.
