Davis challenges the dominant accounts of the Elizabethan literary system, revealing the competing commercial, intellectual, political, and personal interests that swirled around the printing of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia,Astrophel and Stella, and The Defence of Poesie. He also produces lively, accessible, significant new readings of arguably the most influential secular literary work of the Elizabethan age: the 1598 folio Arcadia, comprising all these works. Finally, by applying Jerome J.McGann's revisionary textual theories, Davis generates an original narrative literary history of Sidney's works and many of the most important printing enterprises of 1590s London.
