Download or read book The Heroines of English Pastoral Romance written by Sue P. Starke and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2007 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The figure of the woman as hero in pastoral romance is shown to grow in importance and complexity in this important new study. The genre of pastoral romance flourished dramatically in Renaissance England between 1590 and 1650. One of its key elements is that it is the daughter, not the son, of the gentle family who increasingly becomes the subject of theromance's attempt to define and illustrate heroism. The pastoral heroine's task is paradoxical: to break out of her pastoral paradise in order to ensure its reconstitution. She is the princess, the shepherdess, the Lady, or the virtuous daughter who becomes a repository of honor and virtue in a changing society where traditional chivalric definitions of honor hold decreasing purchase. This groundbreaking book examines the typical challenges facedby the pastoral romance heroine as she matures within the pastoral locus amoenus: the foundling dilemma; the loop-shaped quest: the rhetorical battle; the chastity threat; the reconciliation of beauty to virtue; and familial reunification. It illustrates how the allegorical, symbolic, and psychological characterizations of pastoral heroines in the works of Sidney, Spenser, Wroth, Fletcher, Milton, and Marvell anticipate developments in the representation of female subjectivities normally associated with the novel. SUE P. STARKE is Associate Professor of English at Monmouth University, New Jersey.

Download or read book The Limits of Moralizing written by David Mikics and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book argues that critical tradition has obscured the mutually constitutive relation between the didactic mission of Renaissance epic and the pathos of the epic self." "Critics usually see Spenser and Milton either as poets dedicated to an autonomous aesthetic that dictates indulgence in pathos for its own sake, or as Christian moralists who subordinate pathos to the didactic demands of society. The Romantic tradition that stretches from Keats to Harold Bloom exemplifies the former option. Neo-Christian, reader response, and new historicist critics assert a contrary, but similarly unbalanced, view by choosing the didactic authority of social custom, tradition, or ideology over the pathos of subjectivity." "Resisting attempts to establish an absolute priority for either pathos or moralizing, David Mikics looks to the debate between subjective passions and didactic imperatives as a sign of the complex relation between literary creation and social norms. In a study that shies away from new historicist endorsements of the force of normative ideology, as well as late Romantic celebrations of the poetic self, the author finds that Spenser and Milton develop an innovative literary subjectivity under the pressure of the Reformation's moralizing aims." "Incorporating moral force within pathos would allow poetic passion to become a worthy and clearly justifiable public stance. But Spenser and Milton, in their pursuit of this rhetorical ideal, find themselves acknowledging, instead, an enduring disjunction between affect and the discursive forms of public morality which aim to discipline or exploit it."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book Transforming Work written by Katherine C. Little and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pastoral poetry has long been considered a signature Renaissance mode: originating in late sixteenth-century England via a rediscovery of classical texts, it is concerned with self-fashioning and celebrating the court. But, as Katherine C. Little demonstrates in Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Medieval Poetry, the pastoral mode is in fact indebted to medieval representations of rural labor. Little offers a new literary history for the pastoral, arguing that the authors of the first English pastorals used rural laborers familiar from medieval texts—plowmen and shepherds—to reflect on the social, economic, and religious disruptions of the sixteenth century. In medieval writing, these figures were particularly associated with the reform of the individual and the social world: their work also stood for the penance and good works required of Christians, the care of the flock required of priests, and the obligations of all people to work within their social class. By the sixteenth century, this reformism had taken on a dangerous set of associations—with radical Protestantism, peasants' revolts, and complaints about agrarian capitalism. Pastoral poetry rewrites and empties out this radical potential, making the countryside safe to write about again. Moving from William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the medieval shepherd plays, through the Piers Plowman–tradition, to Edmund Spenser’s pastorals, Little’s reconstructed literary genealogy discovers the “other” past of pastoral in the medieval and Reformation traditions of “writing rural labor.”

Download or read book The Spenser Encyclopedia written by Albert Charles Hamilton and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reference book for scholarship on Edmund Spenser offering a detailed, literary guide to his life, works and influence. Over 700 entries by 422 contributors, an index and extensive bibliography.

Download or read book Courteous exchanges written by Patricia Wareh and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-02 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Courteous Exchanges explores the significant overlap between Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s plays, showing how both facilitate the critique of Renaissance aristocratic identity. Moving from a consideration of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier as a text that encouraged reader engagement, the book offers new readings of Shakespeare’s plays in conjunction with Spenser. It pairs Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and The Winter’s Tale with The Faerie Queene in order to explore how topics such as education, gender, religion, race, and aristocratic identity are offered up to reader and audience interpretation.

Download or read book The art of The Faerie Queene written by Richard Danson Brown and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Art of The Faerie Queene is the first book centrally focused on the forms and poetic techniques employed by Spenser. It offers a sharp new perspective on Spenser by rereading The Faerie Queene as poetry which is at once absorbing, demanding and experimental. Instead of the traditional conservative model of Spenser as poet, this book presents the poem as radical, edgy and unconventional, thus proposing new ways of understanding the Elizabethan poetic Renaissance. The book moves from the individual words of the poem to metre, rhyme and stanza form onto its larger structures of canto and book. It will be of particular relevance to undergraduates studying Elizabethan poetry, graduate students and scholars of Renaissance poetry, for whom the formal aspect of the poetry has been a topic of growing relevance in recent years.

Download or read book English Writers written by Henry Morley and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Studies in Philology written by and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Ceremonies of Innocence written by John D. Bernard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-06-22 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study of pastoralism in Edmund Spenser's poetry.

Download or read book Polliticke Courtier written by Michael F.N. Dixon and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1996-08-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although pervasive in Spenser's art, the role of rhetoric has not been adequately addressed by critics. This disregard of the importance of rhetoric in The Faerie Queene, Dixon argues, obscures Spenser's larger rhetorical method and the structural dynamic it generates. Dixon identifies Britomart's evolution in Books III-V as the poem's centre and elucidates the rhetorical strategies that invest Spenser's "argument" for justice. Building on Kenneth Burke's conception of courtship in rhetoric as "the use of suasive devices for the transcending of social estrangement," Dixon interprets The Faerie Queene as a narrative of courtship in purpose as well as content, arguing that its tales of questing knights compose an artifact of suasive devices whereby Spenser courts a meeting of minds with his audience on the subject of justice.

Download or read book Pastoral Process written by Susan Snyder and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pastoral Process draws a basic distinction between two aspects of the pastoral ideal: the Arcadian pastoral, which locates the unspoiled paradise in space, apart from the complexities of city and court, and finds it accessible for limited periods of recuperation and reorientation; and the Golden Age mode, which locates the ideal pastoral life in time gone by, always already lost as soon as it is apprehended as paradise. The author's central aim is an archaeology of the nostalgia-based pastoral of the vanished Golden Age. On the surface level, her close readings of certain Renaissance poems and sequences--Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, Marvell's Mower poems, and Milton's Lycidas--clarify "pastoral process": the dislocating transition from innocence to experience, from secure centeredness in a comfortable, self-mirroring world to a new condition of division, displacement, and alienation. The advent of individuation and sexual desire, and the internalization of undirectional time and universal death, transform the pastoral paradise into a wasteland or leave the newly self-conscious protagonist outside his former idyll, looking in. Excavation beneath these initial readings uncovers the master myth of Eden that informs them, as well as parallel narratives of loss such as the various accounts of the Golden Age or the tale in Plato's Symposium of beings fallen from original wholeness into fragmentation and lack. Ramifications of the master myth include Christian and Jewish commentaries that helped shape traditional understandings of the story, and especially the subversive tradition that persisted, against the strong tide of orthodox interpretation, in reading the Fall of Man in terms of childhood wholeness breaking down in the wake of sexual knowledge and the burden of full, separated consciousness. Below the poetic utterances and the shaping myths lies the deeper archaeological stratum of the unconscious and the mechanisms that construct, always retrospectively and often counterfactually, a blissful childhood. Beyond Freud's own theories, later offshoots and reworkings of his psychology are invoked to explore psychological experiences and needs that inform both myths and poems: Jung, the developmental psychologists, and especially Lacan. The study concludes by returning to the surface to consider the pastoral impulse in historical terms, as a defining moment in the careers of Spenser, Marvell, and Milton and as a special urgency in the early modern times they inhabited.

Download or read book Spenser s Legal Language written by Andrew Zurcher and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2007 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores Spenser's linguistic experimentation and his engagement with political, and particularly legal, thought and language in his major works, demonstrating by thorough lexical analysis and illustrative readings how Spenser figured the nation both descriptively and prescriptively.

Download or read book Play of Double Senses written by A. Bartlett Giamatti and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1990 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A balanced, coherent reading that is both enlightening and full of delight. --Choice

Download or read book Literature in Protestant England 1560 1660 Routledge Revivals written by Alan Sinfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-07-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hardline, uncompromising theology preached by the English Church in the 16th and 17th Centuries had disturbing effects on the literature of the period. This study, originally published in 1983, assesses the importance of the prevailing religious climate to the work of several major writers, both in and out of sympathy with the contemporary protestantism. It is argued that the accepted view of the period as essentially 'Christian-Humanist' obscures the harsher aspects of a Calvinism which throws into relief the agonies of a writer like Donne, the acceptances of one like George Herbert. Many writers rejected more or less explicitly the Christian dogma, through the heroic assertion of human potential in Shakespearean and other dramatic characters, the nihilism of Marlowe, or the secular rationalism of Bacon and Hobbes. Milton is central to this complex weft of belief and rejection, piety and atheism, acceptance of predestination and determination to accept fate, that characterises the period. Finally, Sinfield shows how this protestantism disintegrated under the strain of internal contradictions and external pressures, and in the process helped to stimulate secularism. In this original and clearly written book, scholarship is deployed unobstrusively to place many major works in an unaccustomed and stimulating perspective.

Download or read book A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser written by Charles Grosvenor Osgood and published by . This book was released on 1915 with total page 1018 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Emotion and the Self in English Renaissance Literature written by Paul Joseph Zajac and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unearthing a little-studied Reformation discourse of contentment, this book shows its surprising significance in Renaissance literature.

Download or read book The Faerie Queene as Children s Literature written by Velma Bourgeois Richmond and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edmund Spenser's vast epic poem The Faerie Queene is the most challenging masterpiece in early modern literature and is praised as the work most representative of the Elizabethan age. In it he fused traditions of medieval romance and classical epic, his religious and political allegory creating a Protestant alternative to the Catholic romances rejected by humanists and Puritans. The poem was later made over as children's literature, retold in lavish volumes and schoolbooks and appreciated in pedagogical studies and literary histories. Distinguished writers for children simplified the stories and noted artists illustrated them. Children were less encouraged to consider the allegory than to be inspired to the moral virtues. This book studies The Faerie Queene's many adaptations for a young audience in order to provide a richer understanding of both the original and adapted texts.