Synopses & Reviews
The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, as defining monuments of English epic in an iconoclastic age.
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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Emerging likeness: Spenserâs 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: Miltonâs 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.