Synopses & Reviews
Reformation iconoclasts viewed verbal images with the same distrust and aversion as visual images, because they too were capable of shaping and thus waylaying the human imagination; and yet the Reformation also produced the defining monuments of English epic. In an extended analysis, both lucid and theoretically sophisticated, Linda Gregerson traces the contradictory cultural roots of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, illuminating the ideological, political, and gender conflicts that Spenser and Milton confronted as they transformed the epic poem into an instrument for the reformation of the political subject.
Synopsis:
Reformation iconclasts viewed the verbal images of poetry with distrust — yet the Reformation also produced the defining monuments of English epic. Linda Gregerson traces the ideological, political, and gender conflicts that Spenser and Milton confronted as they transformed the epic into an instrument for the reformation of the political subject.
Synopsis:
The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, as defining monuments of English epic in an iconoclastic age.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Emerging likeness: Spenser’s mirror sequence of love; 2. The closed image; 3. Narcissus interrupted: specularity and the subject of the Tudor state; 4. The mirror of romance; 5. Fault lines: Milton’s mirror of desire; 6. Words made visible: the embodied rhetoric of Satan, Sin and Death; 7. Divine similitude: language in exile; List of works cited; Index.
Don't Miss
