BUILDING THE PAST: RE-APPROACHING THE ITALIAN LITERARY HERITAGE: 'The Sonnet's Claim': Petrarch and the Romantic Sonnet.

This essay focuses on the importance of Petrarch and the Petrarchan poetical tradition in the Romantic revival of the sonnet, which dominated British poetry in the last decades of the eighteenth century. All the major Romantic poets, among whom many women writers, participated in the critical debate concerning the stylistic aspects of the sonnet. An analysis of some sonnet collections published at the end of the eighteenth century reveals how the revival of this form was intimately connected with the Petrarchan tradition and, at the same time, the emergence of women's poetry. Charlotte Smith's, Mary Robinson's, and Anna Seward's poetical and critical contributions to establish the 'sonnet's claim' is an important example of how women exploited and manipulated the Petrarchan tradition in order to assert their own poetical authority. Similarly, the best-selling poetry of the Della Cruscans uses Petrarch and his imagery to popularize new modes of love and erotic poetry, while their sonnets, and particularly Mary Robinson's, demonstrate how the Petrarchan tradition undergoes an important process of eroticization and feminization in late eighteenth-century British culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]