Results by title
1049 books match the query 'English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh' and 88 start with s
Signs and Symbols in Chaucer's Poetry
John P. Hermann
University of Alabama Press, 1981
Unlocking the rich symbolic world of Chaucer through the lens of medieval culture and meaning.
Innovative and thorough, Signs and Symbols in Chaucer’s Poetry presents nine essays that reexamine the literary iconography of Middle English. Chaucer’s work is the most well-known, and possibly the most significant, remnant of the Middle Ages; investigations into his writing and meanings are fruitful even today. The essays collected by John P. Hermann and John J. Burke Jr. invite scholars to consider new interpretations of old symbols while acknowledging the intricacies of historical context.
Each highly distinguished scholar responds to D. W. Robertson’s seminal, if controversial, approach to Chaucer’s work. Robertson’s scholarship, which also provides the opening essay of the collection, uses a historicist approach to contextualize Chaucer’s imagery within the literary and cultural conventions of the Middle Ages. Sources for such contextualization include etymology, topology, the classics, pictorial art, the Bible, and the developing sciences of the time. Robertson, as well as his contemporary Bernard F. Huppé, provided a fascinating new direction for modern Chaucer studies that focused on daily life.
Each essay uses this approach to draw attention to various examples of Chaucer’s iconography. The texts span several of Chaucer’s works and a plethora of subjects, including music, disappointed expectations, repeated or conflicting signs, and more. This volume provides insight into Chaucer’s work as well as the Middle Ages as a whole, examining conventions and expectations of society at that time. Scholars, instructors, and lovers of Chaucer will all find value in this finely edited collection.
Simplicity and Complexity
Pondering Literature, Science, and PaintingFloyd Merrell
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
R. A. Waldron
Northwestern University Press, 1972
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
In a Modern English Version with a Critical IntroductionTranslated, Edited, and with an Introduction by John Gardner
University of Chicago Press, 2011
The adventures and challenges of Sir Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew and a knight at the Round Table, including his duel with the mysterious Green Knight, are among the oldest and best known of Arthurian stories. Here the distinguished author and poet John Gardner has captured the humor, elegance, and richness of the original Middle English in flowing modern verse translations of this literary masterpiece. Besides the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, this edition includes two allegorical poems, “Purity” and “Patience”; the beautiful dream allegory “Pearl”; and the miracle story “Saint Erkenwald,” all attributed to the same anonymous poet, a contemporary of Chaucer and an artist of the first rank.
Sir Philip Sidney
Selected Prose and PoetryEdited by Robert Kimbrough
University of Wisconsin Press, 1983
Small Change
Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810Harriet Guest
University of Chicago Press, 2000
During the second half of the eighteenth century, the social role of educated women and the nature of domesticity were the focus of widespread debate in Britain. The emergence of an identifiably feminist voice in that debate is the subject of Harriet Guest's new study, which explores how small changes in the meaning of patriotism and the relations between public and private categories permitted educated British women to imagine themselves as political subjects.
Small Change considers the celebration of learned women as tokens of national progress in the context of a commercial culture that complicates notions of gender difference. Guest offers a fascinating account of the women of the bluestocking circle, focusing in particular on Elizabeth Carter, hailed as the paradigmatic learned and domestic woman. She discusses the importance of the American war to the changing relation between patriotism and gender in the 1770s and 1780s, and she casts new light on Mary Wollstonecraft's writing of the 1790s, considering it in relation to the anti-feminine discourse of Hannah More, and the utopian feminism of Mary Hays.
Smile of Discontent
Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British FictionEileen Gillooly
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Gillooly shows how such humor became, for mostly female writers at the time, an unobtrusive and prudent means of expressing discontent with a culture that was ideologically committed to restricting female agency and identity. If the aggression and emotional distance of irony and satire mark them as "masculine," then for Gillooly, the passivity, indirection, and sympathy of the humor she discusses render it "feminine." She goes on to disclose how the humorous tactics employed by writers from Burney to Wharton persist in the work of Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and Penelope Fitzgerald.
The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.
Snow on the Cane Fields
Women’s Writing and Creole SubjectivityJudith Raiskin
University of Minnesota Press, 1995
Snow on the Cane Fields was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In a probing analysis of creole women's writing over the past century, Judith Raiskin explores the workings and influence of cultural and linguistic colonialism. Tracing the transnational and racial meanings of creole identity, Raiskin looks at four English-speaking writers from South Africa and the Caribbean: Olive Schreiner, Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, and Zoë Wicomb. She examines their work in light of the discourses of their times: nineteenth-century "race science" and imperialistic rhetoric, turn-of-the-century anti-Semitic sentiment and feminist pacifism, postcolonial theory, and apartheid legislation.
In their writing and in their multiple identities, these women highlight the gendered nature of race, citizenship, culture, and the language of literature. Raiskin shows how each writer expresses her particular ambivalences and divided loyalties, both enforcing and challenging the proprietary British perspective on colonial history, culture, and language. A new perspective on four writers and their uneasy places in colonial culture, Snow on the Cane Fields reveals the value of pursuing a feminist approach to questions of national, political, and racial identity.
Judith Raiskin is assistant professor of women's studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
So Much Nonsense
Edward Lear
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2007
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
The Owl and the Pussycat is only the most familiar of Edward Lear’s numerous nonsense verses, which have delighted millions worldwide for the last two centuries. Now his beloved verse and drawings are compiled here in a handsomely produced volume of classic material.
Leariana runs rampant in this enchanting treasury; readers encounter such indelible Lear creations as “snail mail,” while drawings of the Stripy Bird and images of the heroic and irrepressible Foss in heraldic poses are scattered throughout. Lear’s zany illustrations are reproduced here in their full vibrancy, and the goofily delightful art, including his illustrated nonsense alphabets, infuses Lear’s fanciful phrases and humorously incomprehensible limericks with their original liveliness and irresistible spirit. Rarely has the powerful charm and timeless appeal of Edward Lear’s work been available in such a beautifully produced edition, and So Much Nonsense is a gift that will unleash the imaginations of young and old alike.
Social Figures
George Eliot, Social History, and Literary RepresentationDaniel Cottom
University of Minnesota Press, 1987
Centers on the discourse of the liberal intellectual as exemplified in the novels of George Eliot, whose awareness of her aesthetic and social task was keener than that of most Victorian writers.
“…Daniel Cottom has produced a readable, well-researched, and thoroughly referenced work that speaks to a broad scholarly audience composed of philosophers, psychologists, sociolinguists, literary critics, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, to name but a few.” Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly
Soliciting Interpretation
Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English PoetryEdited by Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In the first group of essays, David Norbrook, Annabel Patterson, John Guillory, Rosemary Kegl, and Stephen Orgel explore the various ways in which a text can be "political." Next, Arthur Marotti, Jane Tylus, and Jonathan Goldberg consider the circumstances of textual production and reception in the seventeenth century. Finally, Stanley Fish, Gordon Braden, Michael C. Schoenfeldt, and Maureen Quilligan discuss the particular forms of anxiety that result when seventeenth-century poets modify the traditional rhetoric of sexual desire to serve what seem to be erotic or religious purposes.
These essays, accompanied by an extensive editors' introduction, intersect less in their shared enthusiasm for particular authors or interpretative methods than in a common interest in particular critical issues. They present the most exciting work by critics redefining Renaissance studies.
Some Words of Jane Austen
Stuart M. Tave
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Somebody Telling Somebody Else
A Rhetorical Poetics of NarrativeJames Phelan
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
In doing so, he offers new readings of a wide range of narratives from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim to George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle, from Franz Kafka’s “Das Urteil” to Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” from David Small’s Stitches to Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Third and Final Continent,” from John O’Hara’s “Appearances” to Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Phelan contends that the standard view of narrative as a synthesis of story and discourse is inadequate to handle the complexities of narrative communication, and he demonstrates the greater explanatory power of his rhetorical view. Furthermore, Phelan gives new prominence to the presence and activity of the “somebody else,” as he shows that an audience’s unfolding responses to a narrative often influence its very construction.
Somerset Maugham and the Cinema
Robert Calder
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
This study of the famous author explores the relationship between literature and film, what is involved in adaptation, and how best to judge films based on celebrated books. Robert Calder, the world’s leading scholar of Maugham’s work, offers fascinating production histories, insight into both fortunate and misguided casting decisions, shrewd analyses of performances and film techniques, and summaries of public and critical responses. Maugham’s characters were often conflicted, iconoclastic, and morally out of step with their times, which may have accounted for the popularity of his fiction. Most of Maugham’s works could be adapted to satisfy the tastes of moviegoers and the demands of the Hays Office censors, if not the expectations of their author.
Something We Have That They Don't
British and American Poetic Relations since 1925Steve & Mark Clark & Ford
University of Iowa Press, 2004
(I like the way the English spell it
They’re so clever about some things
Probably smarter generally than we are
Although there is supposed to be something
We have that they don’'t—'don’t ask me
What it is. . . .)
—John Ashbery, “Tenth Symphony”
Something We Have That They Don’t presents a variety of essays on the relationship between British and American poetry since 1925. The essays collected here all explore some aspect of the rich and complex history of Anglo-American poetic relations of the last seventy years. Since the dawn of Modernism poets either side of the Atlantic have frequently inspired each other’s developments, from Frost’s galvanizing advice to Edward Thomas to rearrange his prose as verse, to Eliot’s and Auden’s enormous influence on the poetry of their adopted nations (“whichever Auden is,” Eliot once replied when asked if he were a British or an American poet, “I suppose, I must be the other”); from the impact of Charles Olson and other Black Mountain poets on J. H. Prynne and the Cambridge School, to the widespread influence of Frank O'Hara and Robert Lowell on a diverse range of contemporary British poets. Clark and Ford’s study aims to chart some of the currents of these ever-shifting relations. Poets discussed in these essays include John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, Mark Ford, Robert Graves, Thom Gunn, Lee Harwood, Geoffrey Hill, Michael Hofmann, Susan Howe, Robert Lowell, and W. B. Yeats.
“Poetry and sovereignty,” Philip Larkin remarked in an interview of 1982, “are very primitive things”: these essays consider the ways in which even seemingly very “unprimitive” poetries can be seen as reflecting and engaging with issues of national sovereignty and self-interest, and in the process they pose a series of fascinating questions about the national narratives that currently dominate definitions of the British and American poetic traditions.
This innovative and exciting new collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of British and American poetry and comparative literature.
Something and Nothingness
The Fiction of John Updike and John FowlesJohn Neary
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992
John Neary shows that the theological dichotomy of via negativa (which posits the authentic experience of God as absence, darkness, silence) and via affirmativa (which emphasizes presence, images, and the sounds of the earth) is an overlooked key to examining and comparing the works of John Fowles and John Updike.
Drawing on his extensive knowledge of both Christian and secular existentialism within the modern theology of Barth and Levinas and the contemporary critical theory of Derrida and J. Hillis Miller, Neary demonstrates the ultimate affinity of these authors who at first appear such opposites. He makes clear that Fowles’s postmodernist, metafictional experiments reflect the stark existentialism of Camus and Sartre while Updike’s social realism recalls Kierkegaard’s empirical faith in a generous God within a kind of Christian deconstructionism.
Neary’s perception of uncanny similarities between the two authors—whose respective careers are marked by a series of novels that structurally and thematically parallel each other—and the authors’ shared long-term interest in existentialism and theology support both his critical comparison and his argument that neither author is "philosophically more sophisticated nor aesthetically more daring."
Sorley MacLean
Peter Mackay
Aberdeen University Press, 2010
Spectacular Disappearances
Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801Julia H. Fawcett
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914
Kate Holterhoff
Ohio University Press, 2025
This study explores how British romance fictions published between 1859 and 1914 absorbed distinctly Darwinian attitudes toward the epistemology of science—one that accorded with scientific speculation. Following the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, in which Charles Darwin acknowledged arriving at his thesis by allowing himself “to speculate on the subject” of species transmutation, many romance fiction writers embraced, criticized, and promoted acts of speculating characterized as scientific. The romance fictions discussed in this book recurred to Darwin’s speculative methodology more than to rigorous Baconian empiricism because it permitted them to draw pointedly imaginative conclusions in reasonable ways. Kate Holterhoff’s book examines how romance authors like Grant Allen, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle incorporated Darwinian ideas and speculative thinking into their works to advance their ideological and aesthetic goals. Holterhoff uses five paired genres and methods to analyze this engagement:
- scientific romance and experimentation,
- metaphysical romance and thought experiments,
- anthropological romance and reasoning with imperfect data,
- gothic romance and probability, and
- utopian romance and Malthusian political economy.
By focusing on Darwin’s influence in legitimizing speculative methods in science, the book places the interplay between British science and romance fiction into critical perspective and highlights Darwin’s enduring impact on Western culture.
Spellbound
The Fairy Tale and the VictoriansMolly Clark Hillard
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
Through close readings of the novels of Dickens, Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë; the poetry of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti; the visual artistry of Burne-Jones and Punch; and the popular theatricals of dramatists like Planche and Buckingham, Spellbound opens fresh territory into well-traversed titles of the Victorian canon. Hillard demonstrates that these literary forms were all cross-pollenated by the fairy tale and that their authors were—however reluctantly—purveyors of disruptive fairy tale matter over which they had but imperfect control.
Spenser Studies, volume 37 number 1 (2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
Spenser Studies, volume 38 number 1 (2024)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
Spenser Studies, volume 39 number 1 (2025)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025
Spenser Studies, volume 40 number 1 (January 2026)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2026
Spenser Studies
A Renaissance Poetry Annual, volume 35 number 1 (2021)The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
Spenser Studies
A Renaissance Poetry Annual, volume 36 number 1 (2022)The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
Spenser, Milton, and the Redemption of the Epic Hero
Christopher Bond
University of Delaware Press, 2011
Spies and Holy Wars
The Middle East in 20th-Century Crime FictionBy Reeva Spector Simon
University of Texas Press, 2010
Illuminating a powerful intersection between popular culture and global politics, Spies and Holy Wars draws on a sampling of more than eight hundred British and American thrillers that are propelled by the theme of jihad—an Islamic holy war or crusade against the West. Published over the past century, the books in this expansive study encompass spy novels and crime fiction, illustrating new connections between these genres and Western imperialism.
Demonstrating the social implications of the popularity of such books, Reeva Spector Simon covers how the Middle Eastern villain evolved from being the malleable victim before World War II to the international, techno-savvy figure in today's crime novels. She explores the impact of James Bond, pulp fiction, and comic books and also analyzes the ways in which world events shaped the genre, particularly in recent years. Worldwide terrorism and economic domination prevail as the most common sources of narrative tension in these works, while military "tech novels" restored the prestige of the American hero in the wake of post-Vietnam skepticism. Moving beyond stereotypes, Simon examines the relationships between publishing trends, political trends, and popular culture at large—giving voice to the previously unexamined truths that emerge from these provocative page-turners.
Strange Likeness
Description and the Modernist NovelDora Zhang
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Description is the novelistic technique charged with establishing a common world, but in the early twentieth century, there was little agreement about how a common world could be known and represented. Zhang argues that the protagonists in her study responded by shifting description away from visualizing objects to revealing relations—social, formal, and experiential—between disparate phenomena. In addition to shedding new light on some of the best-known works of modernism, Zhang opens up new ways of thinking about description more broadly. She moves us beyond the classic binary of narrate-or-describe and reinvigorates our thinking about the novel. Strange Likeness will enliven conversations around narrative theory, affect theory, philosophy and literature, and reading practices in the academy.
Strange Meetings
Anglo-German Literary Encounters from 1910 to 1960Peter Edgerly Firchow
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
Strange Science
Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian AgeEdited by Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660-1800
Essays in Honor of Samuel Holt MonkHoward Anderson and John S. Shea, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1967
Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800 was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In this volume nineteen contributors, in as many essays, discuss various aspects of critical and aesthetic development in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, from the time of Dryden to Wordsworth. This was a period in which traditional literary criticism progressed in important new directions and which saw the rise of aesthetic theory. The book is published in honor of Samuel Holt Monk, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, and distinguished American scholar in the field of eighteenth century English literature, literary criticism, and aesthetics.
The essays, all of which were written for this volume, analyze the literary theories and assumptions of some of the most important artists and critics of the time, as well as the aesthetic theories which influenced painting and literature. During the period under discussion, the progress of social and philosophical thought stimulated an intensive examination of the nature and function of art. Although neoclassical ideals dominated Restoration criticism and continued to influence Pope and later critics like Johnson and Reynolds, other tendencies were gaining ground, and throughout the eighteenth century the effort to reconcile a growing interest in "the pleasing emotions" with the tenets of classicism created criticism and aesthetic theory of extraordinary complexity. These essays illuminate that complexity without oversimplifying it.
The book is illustrated with reproductions of works of art of the period. In addition to the essays, there is a bibliography of Professor Monk's writings.
Style and the Single Girl
How Modern Women Re-Dressed the Novel, 1922–1977Hope Howell Hodgkins
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
Hodgkins delineates how in the 1920s and 1930s, popular novels by Dorothy Sayers and high-art fiction by Jean Rhys used dress to comment wittily and bitterly on gender relations. During World War II, changes in British Vogue and compromises made by the literary journal Horizon signaled the death of modernist styles, as Elizabeth Bowen’s gender-bent wartime stories show. Then demure and reserved postwar styles—Dior’s curvy New Look, the Movement’s understated literary irony—were intertwined in the fictions of Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark, who re-dressed the novel with a vengeance. Whether fashioning detective fiction, literary impressionism, or postwar comedy, these novelists used style in every sense to redefine that famous question, “What do women want?”
Stylistic and Narrative Structures in the Middle English Romances
By Susan Wittig
University of Texas Press, 1978
This volume provides a generic description, based on a formal analysis of narrative structures, of the Middle English noncyclic verse romances. As a group, these poems have long resisted generic definition and are traditionally considered to be a conglomerate of unrelated tales held together in a historical matrix of similar themes and characters. As single narratives, they are thought of as random collections of events loosely structured in chronological succession. Susan Wittig, however, offers evidence that the romances are carefully ordered (although not always consciously so) according to a series of formulaic patterns and that their structures serve as vehicles for certain essential cultural patterns and are important to the preservation of some community-held beliefs.
The analysis begins on a stylistic level, and the same theoretical principles applied to the linguistic formulas of the poems also serve as a model for the study of narrative structures. The author finds that there are laws that govern the creation, selection, and arrangement of narrative materials in the romance genre and that act to restrict innovation and control the narrative form.
The reasons for this strict control are to be found in the functional relationship of the genre to the culture that produced it. The deep structure of the romance is viewed as a problem-solving pattern that enables the community to mediate important contradictions within its social, economic, and mythic structures. Wittig speculates that these contradictions may lie in the social structures of kinship and marriage and that they have been restructured in the narratives in a “practical” myth: the concept of power gained through the marriage alliance, and the reconciliation of the contradictory notions of marriage for power’s sake and marriage for love’s sake.
This advanced, thorough, and completely original study will be valuable to medieval specialists, classicists, linguists, folklorists, and Biblical scholars working in oral-formulaic narrative structure.
Subjects on Display
Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian FemininityBeth Newman
Ohio University Press, 2004
Subjects on Display explores a recurrent figure at the heart of many nineteenth-century English novels: the retiring, self-effacing woman who is conspicuous for her inconspicuousness. Beth Newman draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and recent work in social history as she argues that this paradoxical figure, who often triumphs over more dazzling, eye-catching rivals, is a response to the forces that made personal display a vexed issue for Victorian women. Chief among these is the changing socioeconomic landscape that made the ideal of the modest woman outlive its usefulness as a class signifier even as it continued to exert moral authority.
This problem cannot be grasped in its full complexity, Newman shows, without considering how the unstable social meanings of display interacted with psychical forces-specifically, the desire to be seen by others that is central to both masculine and feminine subjectivity. This desire raises an issue that feminist theorists have been reluctant to address: the importance of pleasure in being the object of the look. Their reluctance is characteristic of cultural theory, which has tended to equate subjectivity with the position of the observer rather than the observed.
Through a consideration of fiction by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Newman shifts the inquiry toward the observed in the experience of being seen. In the process she reopens the question of the gaze and its relation to subjectivity.
Subjects on Display will appeal to scholars and students in several disciplines as it returns psychoanalysis to a central position within literary and cultural studies.
Such Is My Love
A Study of Shakespeare's SonnetsJoseph Pequigney
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Sweet Science
Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of LifeAmanda Jo Goldstein
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon De rerum natura for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry’s role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.
Symmetry and Sense
The Poetry of Sir Philip SidneyBy Robert L. Montgomery
University of Texas Press, 1961
Few Elizabethans left the image of their personalities cut so deeply into the Renaissance imagination as did Sir Philip Sidney. Widely admired in his own time, Sidney must seem to the modern reader almost universally accomplished. His talents as courtier, diplomat, soldier, scholar, novelist, and poet are history.
Almost immediately after Sidney's death in battle against the Spaniards in the Low Countries, the process of legend began, and the legend has survived, sometimes obscuring the facts. The versatile "Renaissance man" has become, in the eyes of some critics, the romantic lover whose frustrations and despair found release in the "confessional" form of the sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, and in other poems. To show these poems to be consciously constructed works of art, not simply passionate outbursts of romantic emotion, is one aim of this study.
The author examines Sidney as poet and critic, concentrating his study on rhetorical technique and poetic rhythm and form. He shows Sidney experimenting with the symmetrical possibilities of rhythm and phrase; practicing the ornateness current and acceptable in his day. He examines Sidney's comment on such a style in The Defense of Poesy and the ways in which the poet's own work agreed with or departed from his expressed opinions. He also balances Sidney's poetry against the powerful tradition of Petrarchan love literature and the equally powerful Renaissance impulse to subject passion to the rule of reason. Finally, in an extended analysis of Astrophel and Stella, he shows Sidney as the master of a plainer, wittier, more subtly fashioned style and a complex, more dramatically immediate form. What emerges from the study is not the personality of the poet, but the principles of his art and the value of his achievement in the mainstream of English Renaissance verse.