Joel B. Davis

People sometimes ask me, 'who is this Philip Sidney guy you write about?' And I have to say: Philip Sidney is the paragon of the Elizabethan Age, that's who. Though Sidney lived only 32 years, he changed the course of English literature and a lot more. His unfinished Arcadia is an epic romance and rhetorical tour de force unmatched in any language and was the most popular work of secular literature in English for nearly two centuries after its publication in 1590. His sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, started the Elizabethan sonnet craze and is arguably the greatest sequence in English (Shake-speares Sonnets come nowhere near the formal variety and intricate design of Sidney's sequence). And Sidney's Defence of Poesy is the first full-bodied statement of literary aesthetics in English, a fascinating ethics of writing, and a subtle, urbane, witty rhetorical paradox. If anything, Sidney was more admired on the Continent than in England. The Dutch revere him to this day for all he did in their revolt against Spanish rule: he died of wounds suffered in a raid on Spanish supply lines outside Zutphen. Everybody should read some Sidney -- he's nourishment for the soul.

My book, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia and the Invention of English Literature, is for graduate students and researchers, for the most part. I have tried to make the prose free of unnecessary jargon, and I have *really* tried to make the book accessible to graduate students doing research on Sidney: it is the kind of book I wish I had had when I first tangled with the Arcadia in all its forms. I set the account of the publication history of the Arcadia within an argument about the way the discipline of English formed in the hopes of showing new scholars just how the formation of our discipline has altered the way we understand early printed books, and how much really interesting, fundamental literary-historical work is still needed today. I hope you find it helpful.