The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan SonneteerThis 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. |
Contents
Acknowledgments | 9 |
The Divided Aims | 39 |
Astrophil and Stella and the Failure of the Right Poet | 69 |
Copyright | |
8 other sections not shown
Common terms and phrases
action ambition Amoretti Arcadia Astrophil and Stella authority beauty Caelica Carew chap conventional countess of Pembroke courtier courtly critics cultural David dedicated Defence of Poetry Delia desire discourse divine doth Duncan-Jones edited Edmund Spenser elegy Elizabeth Elizabethan Sonnet England English Literary Renaissance English Renaissance English Studies example exemplary expresses Faerie Queene female Fulke Greville grace Greville's heaven heavenly heroic History honor human humanist husband ideal imitate immortal John lady Lady Mary Wroth lady's language learning legend London Lord lover Lyric marriage Mars Mary Sidney Mary Wroth metaphor mistress moral Muses Musophilus Oxford patronage Petrarch Petrarchan poem poet-lover poet's poetic political praise pride Princeton University Press Protestant Pyrocles reader Rhetoric rhyme right poet role Rosamond Ryme Samuel Daniel sexual Sidney's Sidney's death Sidney's Defence Sir Philip Sidney social sonnet sequence speaker Spenser Spenser's Amoretti Studies in English Thomas verse vertues virtue virtuous wife writing York