A general critical study of Sidney's life and works, first published in 1977: his life in relation to his works and both in relation to his age. In the late 1570s and early 1580s, when the literary scene in England was barren, Sidney emerged as the right man at the right moment to establish a national literature. In his Defence of Poetry he formulated a poetic which showed 'why and how' imaginative literature could be written in Protestant England; and in his poetry and prose, chiefly in Astrophel and Stella and the two versions of The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, he revealed that the...