1st Edition
Strategies of Failure in the Early Modern Sonnet Petrarch, Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Wroth
By D. K. Smith
Copyright 2026
228 Pages
by
Routledge
228 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
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... Read more
1. Introduction: The Success of Failure 2. Performing Failure in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 3. Structural Failure: Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch in Early Modern England 4. Sidney’s Sonneteering Virtue: Failing to be Petrarch 5. Failing to Succeed: Shakespeare and the Art of Failure 6. Lady Mary Wroth’s Supplemental Failure 7. Bibliography
Biography
D. K. Smith is Associate Professor of English at Kansas State University.
