Billone, Amy Christine 1972-

PERSONAL:

Born February 9, 1972. Education: University of Chicago, B.A.; Princeton University, M.A., Ph.D., 2001.

ADDRESSES:

Home—TN. Office—Department of English, 416 McClung Tower, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, teaching assistant and lecturer, 1996-2001; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, assistant professor, 2001-07, associate professor of English, 2007—.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association, Browning Society, North American Victorian Studies Association, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Argonne fellowship, University of Chicago, 1989-1993; Academy of American Poets Award, University of Chicago, 1993; Presidential fellowship, Princeton University, 1993-99; Hodges grants for research in lieu of teaching, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2002, 2003, 2005, and 2007. Sidonie Clauss Memorial Prize, Princeton University, 2003, for finest dissertation defended in the comparative literature department over a two-year period; Professional Development Award, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2003; John C. Hodges Excellence in Teaching Award for assistant professors, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005.

WRITINGS:

(Editor and author of introduction, notes, and bibliography) J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (novel), illustrated by F.D. Bedford, Barnes & Noble Classics (New York, NY), 2005.

Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (nonfiction), Ohio State University Press (Columbus, OH), 2007.

Contributor to books, including Silence, Sublimity and Suppression in the Romantic Period, edited by Fiona Price and S.J. Masson, Mellen Press (New York, NY), 2002. Contributor of articles to journals, including Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Browning Society Notes, Nineteenth Century French Studies, and Victorian Poetry. Contributor of poems to periodicals, including Poetry Review, Abbey, Bellowing Ark, Hurricane Review, Mobius, Plainsongs, Red Rock Review, and Blind Man's Rainbow.

SIDELIGHTS:

Writer and university professor Amy Christine Billone is a specialist in nineteenth-century British literature. In Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet, she explores the role that gender issues played in the work of British female sonneteers of that period. The sonnet, she says, is a reticent structure that allowed women a veiled means of addressing the problem of their second-class status in the literary world. At the time of its publication, she says in the introduction, her book was the only one covering a wide range of nineteenth-century women sonneteers. Billone does not seek to read their poems as biographies, noting instead that some of their work disguises the realities of their lives, although she remains open to "biographical light that shines through." Among the poets she discusses are Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Smith, Anna Maria Smallpiece, and Isabella Southern. Some of these poets have been accorded little respect by modern scholars, she notes, while others, such as Barrett and Rossetti, have been misinterpreted. "This book," Billone writes in her introduction, "makes a case for the vital role women sonneteers have played in literary history." She adds: "Nineteenth-century women poets wrote on two different levels—mutely and musically—complexly gendering the double function of sonnets, and, by extension, of all lyric poems, as at once soundless and harmonic ‘little songs.’"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

ONLINE

Ohio State University Press Web site,http://www.ohiostatepress.org/ (January 30, 2008), excerpt from Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet.

Slippery Rock University, SLAB Magazine Web site,http://academics.sru.edu/ (January 30, 2008), brief biography.

University of Tennessee-Knoxville Web site,http://www.utk.edu/ (January 30, 2008), brief biography.