Strategies of Failure in the Early Modern Sonnet

This book offers an ambitious reassessment of the post- Petrarchan tradition. Elegantly and lucidly written, it examines the uses of failure as a poetic strategy in the Petrarchan sonnet sequence- a strategy that originated with Petrarch and was then imitated and developed in the English Renaissance lyric.Critics have long noted the existence of failure in the Petrarchan enterprise, but no one has...