Failure is a fundamental human experience, and narrating failure is also a phenomenon that transcends time. The contributions in this volume examine the narrative engagement with failure in various literary and historiographical genres of the pre-modern period and show what functions, aims and possible meanings are associated with it. They also investigate ways of coping with failure through strategies of explanation, repulse, or reinterpretation, with a special focus on transcendental patterns. Failure is also examined in its rhetorical stagings and its poetological dimensions. The narrative of failure proves to be a productive moment of meaning-making and a figure of reflection with far-reaching cultural significance.