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Sonnets and the First Person Plural

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Article

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Abstract

This essay considers the pronoun 'we' in the love sonnets of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, in the light of developments in the study of social cognition. Some philosophers and cognitive scientists have developed the idea of an 'individual we', a state of the individual mind that is transformed by interaction with others. This idea is parsimonious, in that it does not posit, for example, a group mind, but it also allows for changes in the individual as a result of shared experience. It proves illuminating as a prompt for rethinking pronominal assertions of mutuality (some convincing, some not) in sonnets, and the poems themselves reflect back on what it is to say 'we'.

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Keywords

English literature, 1500-1599, Sidney, Sir Philip(1554-1586), 0000 0001 2138 6465, poetry, love sonnet, Spenser, Edmund(1552?-1599), 0000 0004 5302 8242, Shakespeare, William(1564-1616), 0000 0001 2103 2683, first person plural narration, mutuality, social cognition

Journal Title

Cambridge Quarterly

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Journal ISSN

1471-6836
1471-6836

Volume Title

48

Publisher

Oxford University Press

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All rights reserved