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.
Review
"Here we have a detailed examination of literary style and achievement in epic poetry that brings Spenser and Milton more clearly into focus." Bibliotheque D'Humanisme
Review
"...a worthy 1990s response to the last two English poetic epics." Diane Parkin-Speer, Sixteenth Century Journal
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.
Synopsis
Reformation iconoclasts found verbal figures dangerous, because SH like pictures or statuary SH they were capable of shaping and thus of waylaying the human imagination; and yet the Reformation produced the defining monuments of English epic. Through detailed readings of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, and using feminist, psychoanalytic, political, and formal analysis, Linda Gregerson traces the strategies by which Spenser, and then Milton, distinguished their poems from idols, while making the epic poem an instrument for the reformation of the reading and political subject.
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.