Sokolov explores the potential poetic continuum between the medieval period and the Renaissance by rereading a number of early modern Petrarchan texts as discursively linked to medieval English poetry and poetics of selfhood. In England during the 16th and 17th centuries, he contends, Petrarchan subjectivities were articulated in the vernacular poetic medium that, to a tangible degree, retained traces of medieval structures of discourse and selfhood, and vestigial fragments of medieval poetic imagination can be uncovered in the poetry of English Petrarchans from Thomas Wyatt to Shakespeare. He cites several examples of later poets integrating medieval sensibilities into their Petrarchan modernism. Annotation 2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
