John S. Garrison is Professor of English at Grinnell College, where he teaches courses on early modern literature and culture. His previous books include Glass (2015) and Shakespeare and the Afterlife (OUP, 2019). He has received fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Renaissance Society of America. In 2021, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

• List of Figures


• Acknowledgments


• Introduction: Remembering the Sonnets


• 1: Time, Hope, and Desire


• 2: The Pleasure of the Sonnets


• 3: Embracing Absence


• 4: Body, Remember


• 5: Scenographies of Waiting


• 6: Remembering, Repeating, and Writing-Through


• 7: Contagious Memory


• Bibliography


• Index

This imaginative and richly detailed study explores the deep connection between desire and recollection in Shakespeare's poetry. Drawing on cognitive science, the early modern memory arts, and psychoanalysis, as well as works by contemporary authors, the book shows how Shakespeare's Sonnets treat memory as a form of poetic narrative.