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THE NATURE OF ASONNET sequence as a poetic art form is essentially twofold: it contains self-sufficient, proso di cally complex poems, each seeking to develop an idea to its conclusion; but it also typically functions as a sequence, an integrated work in which poems have been ordered, and characters fashioned, to make sense when the work is read from beginning to end. It seems hardly necessary to point this out; yet, while the sonnets of the Petrarchan discourse receive what appears to be continuous critical attention, acknowledgment of their "sequentiality" is rare and at best tacit. There is a need to turn critical attention to mechanisms that sonneteers employ to foster a perception of cohesion, as well as to acknowledge that such preoccupations betray the presence of novelistic thinking.
The sonnet sequence genre constructs a double sense of immediacy: drawing on the lyricism of its constituent sonnets, it also often generates a perception of a personal narrative when the sequence is read from beginning to end. Sonneteers use many speaker figures or voices in the sonnets that constitute a sequence; one of the more striking examples is certainly Petrarch's giving of the first-personplural voice to "little animals" in his sonnet 8.l Yet varied uses of voice in individual sonnets detract little, if at all, from the impression created in the mind of the reader that they are reading a love story told in the first person. The disjointed nature of the sonnet sequence "voice" is an important part of its effect. Thus, talking about the birth of the sonnet sequence vogue, Jacques Barzun writes: "[Petrarch] fashioned into a shapely quasi narrative work, a kind of allusive autobiography . . . Sonnet sequences like Petrarch's or Shakespeare's make possible a narrative-by-episode; the poet need not versify any connective matter as he must in an epic. Rather, he anticipates by five or six hundred years the technique of film and television";2 and Roland Greene considers the history of Petrarchism from the fourteenth to the twentieth century representative of the staged development of the sequence's "fictional" mode.3 As such, it is a rare literary genre to offer first-person fictions to the medieval and early modern reader, and for a long time the only one to deal with erotic...