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 ever given it its proper due. Failure has been viewed as a passing phenomenon, a side-effect of character, an all but inadvertent aspect of the form. The time has come to consider it a strategy. This book explores the role that deliberate strategic failure has played in the burgeoning representation of complex literary subjectivity that is at the heart of early modern English poetry.

Written for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and experts in the field, it provides a new means of understanding the dynamic of the Renaissance sonnet sequence, offering a new methodological approach that allows us to read these traditional texts in unexpected and illuminating ways.