『애가체 소네트』를 통한 샬럿 스미스의 시적 성취 = Charlotte Smith's Poetic Accomplishment by Her Elegiac Sonnets

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The sonnet revival of the late eighteenth century is the first period of literary history in which women poets showed that they could match skills with men poets in the arena of the sonnet, which was previously closed to them by masculine literary traditions. The sonnet is form that women writers deliberately claimed in order to legitimize themselves as poets and to mediate a palace for themselves in its tradition.
For Charlotte Smith, poetic form was the means to poetic fame, and she sought a form that suited better the English language and the contemporary mood. Her Elegiac Sonnets offers a new perspective on its engagement with eighteenth-century conceptions of elegy and the Petrarchan sonnet tradition. The elegiac sonnet has no clear antecedent and so Smith appears to be designating a new kind of sonnet. And the title of Elegiac Sonnets announces the illegitimacy of the poems it designates and also it seems the sonnet tradition collides with that of the elegy.
Smith's power lies in her ability to transform Petrarch's Italian into her own poetic idiom, which is not merely the English language but also the formalized expression of the elegiac sonnet. In so doing, she creates a new form that connects two seemingly disparate traditions but without blindly adopting them. The hybrid, bastardized form serves both Smith's mournful expression by adopting the elegiac form, with its thematic implications, and her critique of the Petrarchan sonnet in both its formal properties and its erotic and poetic ideologies. Smith takes issue with the influential Petrarchan portrayals of women but, extends her critique to include Petrarchan form itself.
Calling her sonnets Elegiac Sonnets, Smith announces its very "illegitimacy" in the collision of poetic forms, but on the other hand, shows that her sonnets are decidedly not legitimate if that must mean a robotic adherence to Petrarchan tenets. In this way she justifies the potentially oxymoronic title, and she successfully informs her identity as a woman poet.