Bibliography by Kris McAbee

By Kris McAbee, The Sonnet Virus Team

1. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees. London: Verso, 2007.

2. Rollins, Hyder Edward. Tottel’s Miscellany (1557-1587). Vols. 1-2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928.

In this two-volume facsimile of the 1557 through 1587 editions of the collections of poems published by Richard Tottel, Hyder Rollins provides in order of printing the full text of this ground-breaking publication along with a list of variant readings and misprints, and variations in reprints.  His second volume includes photographic facsimiles of the title pages of the nine editions from this ten-year period.  Rollins also supplies an extended introduction (in the second volume) include biographies of Tottell and the various contributors to his miscellany.  His analysis of the various editions, complete with insights into “doubtful Elizabethan editions,” eighteenth-century eidtions, and modern editions affords a comprehensive study of the circulation of the first published sonnets in England.

3. Smith, Rosalind. Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621: The Politics of Absence.  New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

    Rosalind Smith’s recent book argues that the dearth of female sonneteers in the years in which the sonnet vogue reached is height, can be attributed to the popularity and abundant circulation of a particular sonnet sequence, explicitly connected with issues of gender and female sexuality: the casket sonnets of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.  These sonnets, which were taken to be autobiographical and particularly salacious, sealed Mary Stuart’s political fate, and were widely circulated from 1571 onward.  Smith provides one of the only chapter-length studies of Anne Lok’s ground-breaking sonnet sequence of 1560. Also included are chapters on Lady Mary Wroth and the Pandora sonnets of 1584 (attributed to Anne De Vere).  Focusing throughout on what Smith calls the “politics of absence,” which takes the form of prosopopoeia and withdrawal in her later chapters, the book asks why women writers of sixteenth-century England contributed so rarely to the supremely popular genre of the sonnet sequence: “Structured around the detailed local histories of each text’s production and circulation, it seeks to construct a generic history that accommodates rupture and hiatus without recourse to assumed absence, invented tradition or uncritical reinforcement of the male-authored tradition as normative” (1).  As such, Smith challenges the dominant paradigm of sonnet sequence authorship and circulation, suggesting that new narratives can be ascertained to accommodate for heretofore insuffeciently acknowledged factors such as gender and absence.

4. Spiller, Michael R. G.  The Development of the Sonnet. New York: Routledge, 1992.

 Among Spiller’s book-length studies of the sonnet, this one delves most into the story of the sonnet’s progression from a writing exercise in thirteenth-century Italy to the poetic form par excellence of the last two decades of the sixteenth century in England to become the longest-lived of all prescibed poetic forms.  Spiller engages directly with the formal qualities of the sonnet in his study of its migration and growth.  This book takes a global approach to the sonnet form, independent of theme and purpose; thus, Spiller, in contrast to other scholars, does not regard courtly love themes as an intrinsic feature of the Renaissance sonnet.  However, his global approach does nonetheless lean toward an interest in love sonnets, with extended studies of the work of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare.  Likewise, this book ends its story with the seventeenth century and, after a chapter on Petrarch, largely concentrates on England.  As an appendix, Spiller provides thorough list of “Publication Dates of Sonnet Sequences,” from 1560 through 1637.  His list also includes the number of sonnets included in each sequence, as well as a list of important sequences that had significant circulation in manuscript form (198-199).  Throughout, Spiller widely documents variations in rhyme scheme as employed various sonneteers and does not limit his examination to canonical writers.

5.  Wilensky, U.  NetLogo. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo. Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1999.

According to the software’s website, “NetLogo is a programmable modeling environment for simulating natural and social phenomena” (“What is NetLogo?”).  Because NetLogo is programmable, it can be used to model a variety of phenomena, viewable in both 2D and 3D.  The features of the environment allow for a range of uses from the purely aesthetic to the concretely educational.  “[P]articularly well suited for modeling complex systems developing over time,” NetLogo can be used to simulate the interactions of various factors and conditions on thousands of “agents,” which represent the individual units of any given system.  Modelers instruct the software to create links among the factors and agents, so that the results of the changing factors can be visually modeled.  The models, then, can demonstrate how changes certain in factors or conditions effect the system overall.  Because NetLogo provides a series of tutorials and references, it appears to be user-friendly on the whole.  The website provides free downloads of NetLogo, which provides full access to the complete NetLogo library of models.  These models, as well as any created using NetLogo, can be deployed in web browsers via Java.  Moreover, the simulations provided by NetLogo can be modified to create new simulations.  The fact that the majority of the simulations in the Model Library “address many content areas in the natural and social sciences, including biology and medicine, physics and chemistry, mathematics and computer science, and economics and social psychology” suggests that the potential for use in the humanities, and literary studies in particular, has been largely untapped.