The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer

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University of Delaware Press, 1998 - History - 319 pages
This book gives the reader a new perspective on the significance of Sir Philip Sidney to the English Renaissance by focusing on his conflicted exemplarity as it is fashioned by his contemporaries and poetic successors. It explores how Sidney's fellow poets constructed and contested his legendary image. These poets initially drew on his example to define and authorize themselves, but their sonnets and other writings ultimately criticize and variously refashion Sidney's heroic image and his literary practice. The sonnet sequence, often neglected in serious study of these writers, is here seen as a forum for the reformation of Petrarchism and an important locus of literary change.

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Contents

Acknowledgments
9
The Divided Aims
39
Astrophil and Stella and the Failure of the Right Poet
69
Copyright

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