Choice Outstanding Academic Text
Award Winner for 2008

"In The World of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Robert Matz offers readers elegant guidance into the social and literary conventions that shape Shakespeare's poems and have influenced their reception over the past four hundred years. The book is especially astute in its reading of the sex-gender system, including its class and racial dimensions, in which Shakespeare conceived his fair young male beloved and his black mistress. This is the book I would recommend to any novice and even to more experienced readers approaching the sonnets."

--Jonathan Goldberg, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, Department of English, Emory University


Reviews

Choice Magazine

"The most realistically balanced, generally honest guide to these remarkable poems that this reviewer has encountered."  read more  

Jonathan Goldberg,
Emory University

"This is the book I would recommend to any novice and even to more experienced readers approaching the sonnets." read more

Nichole Lehman,
Chantilly High School

"This book will come in handy when I teach the sonnets." read more

Katherine Duncan-Jones, editor of the Arden Sonnets,
Oxford  University

"Matz proves himself to be a sharp and subtle analyst of individual Sonnets."
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