This book gives the reader a new perspective on the significance of Sir Philip Sidney to the English Renaissance by focusing on his conflicted exemplarity as it is fashioned by his contemporaries and poetic successors. It explores how Sidney's fellow poets constructed and contested his legendary image.

These poets initially drew on his example to define and authorize themselves, but their sonnets and other writings ultimately criticize and variously refashion Sidney's heroic image and his literary practice. The sonnet sequence, often neglected in serious study of these writers, is here seen as a forum for the reformation of Petrarchism and an important locus of literary change.

Stressing the importance of sonnets as producers as well as products of Elizabethan culture, this book is a work of cultural poetics in the broadest sense of the term. Yet its new interpretation of Sidney's importance to his contemporary sonneteers is grounded in the careful analysis of literary texts.

In sum, it contends that Greville, Daniel, and Spenser, while working in conventional forms and in the bright shadow of Sidney, nonetheless demonstrate the authority of the individual poet to pressure conventional forms and to refashion Sidney's heroic image.