Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England

Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England PDF Author: Richard Mallette
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803231955
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England is a wide-ranging exploration of the relationships among literature, religion, and politics in Renaissance England. Richard Mallette demonstrates how one of the great masterpieces of English literature, Edmund Spenser?s The Faerie Queene, reproduces, criticizes, parodies, and transforms the discourses of England during that remarkable political and literary era. ø According to Mallette, The Faerie Queene not only represents Reformation values but also challenges, questions, and frequently undermines Protestant assumptions. Building upon recent scholarship, particularly new historicism, Protestant poetics, feminism, and gender theory, this ambitious study traces The Faerie Queene?s linkage of religion to political and social realms. Mallette?s study expands traditional theological conceptions of Renaissance England, showing how the poem incorporates and transmutes religious discourses and thereby tests, appraises, and questions their avowals and assurances. The book?s focus on religious discourses leads Mallette to examine how such matters as marriage, gender, the body, revenge, sexuality, and foreign policy were represented?in both traditional and subversive ways?in Spenser?s influential masterpiece. ø A bold and finely argued contribution to our understanding of Spenser, Reformation thought, and Renaissance literature and society, Mallette?s study will add to the ongoing reassessment of England during this important period.

Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England

Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England PDF Author: Richard Mallette
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803231955
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England is a wide-ranging exploration of the relationships among literature, religion, and politics in Renaissance England. Richard Mallette demonstrates how one of the great masterpieces of English literature, Edmund Spenser?s The Faerie Queene, reproduces, criticizes, parodies, and transforms the discourses of England during that remarkable political and literary era. ø According to Mallette, The Faerie Queene not only represents Reformation values but also challenges, questions, and frequently undermines Protestant assumptions. Building upon recent scholarship, particularly new historicism, Protestant poetics, feminism, and gender theory, this ambitious study traces The Faerie Queene?s linkage of religion to political and social realms. Mallette?s study expands traditional theological conceptions of Renaissance England, showing how the poem incorporates and transmutes religious discourses and thereby tests, appraises, and questions their avowals and assurances. The book?s focus on religious discourses leads Mallette to examine how such matters as marriage, gender, the body, revenge, sexuality, and foreign policy were represented?in both traditional and subversive ways?in Spenser?s influential masterpiece. ø A bold and finely argued contribution to our understanding of Spenser, Reformation thought, and Renaissance literature and society, Mallette?s study will add to the ongoing reassessment of England during this important period.

Writing and Religion in England, 1558-1689

Writing and Religion in England, 1558-1689 PDF Author: Professor Anthony W Johnson
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 140947559X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Book Description
The fruit of intensive collaboration among leading international specialists on the literature, religion and culture of early modern England, this volume examines the relationship between writing and religion in England from 1558, the year of the Elizabethan Settlement, up until the Act of Toleration of 1689. Throughout these studies, religious writing is broadly taken as being 'communicational' in the etymological sense: that is, as a medium which played a significant role in the creation or consolidation of communities. Some texts shaped or reinforced one particular kind of religious identity, whereas others fostered communities which cut across the religious borderlines which prevailed in other areas of social interaction. For a number of the scholars writing here, such communal differences correlate with different ways of drawing on the resources of cultural memory. The denominational spectrum covered ranges from several varieties of Dissent, through via media Anglicanism, to Laudianism and Roman Catholicism, and there are also glances towards heresy and the mid-seventeenth century's new atheism. With respect to the range of different genres examined, the volume spans the gamut from poetry, fictional prose, drama, court masque, sermons, devotional works, theological treatises, confessions of faith, church constitutions, tracts, and letters, to history-writing and translation. Arranged in roughly chronological order, Writing and Religion in England, 1558-1689 presents chapters which explore religious writing within the wider contexts of culture, ideas, attitudes, and law, as well as studies which concentrate more on the texts and readerships of particular writers. Several contributors embrace an inter-arts orientation, relating writing to liturgical ceremony, painting, music and architecture, while others opt for a stronger sociological slant, explicitly emphasizing the role of women writers and of writers from different sub-cultural backgrounds.

Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England

Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England PDF Author: Susannah Brietz Monta
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521844987
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
A comprehensive comparison of the representations of early modern Protestant and Catholic martyrs.

Spenser’s Heavenly Elizabeth

Spenser’s Heavenly Elizabeth PDF Author: Donald Stump
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030271153
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This book reveals the queen behind Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Placing Spenser’s epic poem in the context of the tumultuous sixteenth century, Donald Stump offers a groundbreaking reading of the poem as an allegory of Elizabeth I’s life. By narrating the loves and wars of an Arthurian realm that mirrors Elizabethan England, Spenser explores the crises that shaped Elizabeth’s reign: her break with the pope to create a reformed English Church, her standoff with Mary, Queen of Scots, offensives against Irish rebels and Spanish troops, confrontations with assassins and foreign invaders, and the apocalyptic expectations of the English people in a time of national transformation. Brilliantly reconciling moral and historicist readings, this volume offers a major new interpretation of The Faerie Queene.

Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England

Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England PDF Author: Dr Aaron Kitch
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409475301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Crossing the disciplinary borders between political, religious, and economic history, Aaron Kitch's innovative new study demonstrates how sixteenth-century treatises and debates about trade influenced early modern English literature by shaping key formal and aesthetic concerns of authors between 1580 and 1630. The author's analysis concentrates on a commonly overlooked period of economic history-the English commercial revolution before 1620-and, utilizing an impressive combination of archival research, close reading, and attention to historical detail, traces the transformation of genre in both neglected and canonical texts. The topics here are wide-ranging but are presented with a commitment to providing a concrete understanding of the religious, political, and historic context in literary thought. Kitch begins with the emerging wool trade and explosion of economic writing, Spenser's glorification of commerce and the Protestant state as presented in The Faerie Queene, and writers such as Thomas Nashe who drew on the same economic principles to challenge Spenser. Other topics include the reaction to the herring trade in prose satire and pamphlets, the presentation of Jewish trading nations in Shakespeare and Marlowe, and the tension between the crown and London merchants as reflected in Middleton's city comedies and Jonson's and Munday's pageants and court masques.

Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser PDF Author: J. B. Lethbridge
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838640661
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This is a collection of wide-ranging papers on Edmund Spenser, including criticism on the Shepheardes Calender, Spenser's rhymes, his impact on Louis MacNeice, the medieval organizations of the Faerie Queene, on the Mutabilite Cantos, Temperance in Book II, and Friendship in Book IV, Written by younger as well as by well-established scholars, the contributors move quietly away from theoretically dominated criticism, and emphasize the importance of historical criticism, both breaking new ground and recuperating neglected insights and approaches. The introduction describes and defends the current trend towards a renewed historical criticism in Spenser criticism. The papers contribute to our knowledge of Spenser's life as well as to our understanding of his poetry. J. B. Lethbridge lectures at the English seminar at Tubingen University.

Spenserian allegory and Elizabethan biblical exegesis

Spenserian allegory and Elizabethan biblical exegesis PDF Author: Margaret Christian
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152610783X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Edmund Spenser famously conceded to his friend Walter Raleigh that his method in The Faerie Queene 'will seeme displeasaunt' to those who would 'rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large.' Spenser's allegory and Elizabethan biblical exegesis is the first book-length study to clarify Spenser's comparison by introducing readers to the biblical typologies of contemporary sermons and liturgies. The result demonstrates that 'precepts ... sermoned at large' from lecterns and pulpits were themselves often 'clowdily enwrapped in allegoricall devises'. In effect, routine churchgoing prepared Spenser's first readers to enjoy and interpret The Faerie Queene. A wealth of relevant quotations invites readers to adopt an Elizabethan mindset and encounter the poem afresh. The 'chronicle history' cantos, Florimell's adventures, the Souldan episode, Mercilla's judgment on Duessa and even the two stanzas that close the Mutabilitie fragment, all come into sharper focus when juxtaposed with contemporary religious rhetoric.

Allegory and Enchantment

Allegory and Enchantment PDF Author: Jason Crawford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191092126
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
What is modernity? Where are modernitys points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Allegory and Enchantment explores these broad questions by considering the work of English writers at the threshold of modernity, and by considering,in particular, the cultural forms these writers want to leave behind. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, many English writers fashion themselves as engaged in breaking away from an array of old idols: magic, superstition, tradition, the sacramental, the medieval. Many of these writers persistently use metaphors of disenchantment, of awakening from a broken spell, to describe their self-consciously modern orientation toward a medieval past. And many of them associate that repudiated past with the dynamics and conventions of allegory. In the hands of the major English practitioners of allegorical narrativeWilliam Langland, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyanallegory shows signs of strain and disintegration. The work of these writers seems to suggest a story of modern emergence in which medieval allegory, with its search for divine order in the material world, breaks down under the pressure of modern disenchantment. But these four early modern writers also make possible other understandings of modernity. Each of them turns to allegory as a central organizing principle for his most ambitious poetic projects. Each discovers in the ancient forms of allegory a vital, powerful instrument of disenchantment. Each of them, therefore, opens up surprising possibilities: that allegory and modernity are inescapably linked; that the story of modern emergence is much older than the early modern period; and that the things modernity has tried to repudiatethe old enchantmentsare not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.

Spenser's Supreme Fiction

Spenser's Supreme Fiction PDF Author: Jon A. Quitslund
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802035059
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
In Spenser's Supreme Fiction, Jon A. Quitslund offers a rich analysis of The Faerie Queene and of several texts contributing to the revival of Platonism stimulated by Marsilio Ficino's labours as a translator and interpreter of Plato and the ancient Neoplatonists. To the old issue of the scope and character of Spenser's Platonism, Quitslund brings fresh insights from contemporary views on gender and identity, intertextuality, and the centrality of fiction within all aspects of Renaissance culture. He argues that Spenser sought authority for his poem by grounding its narrative in a divinely ordained natural order, intelligible in terms derived from the ancient sources of poetry and philosophy. Passages central to the poet's world-making project are shown to be intertextually linked to Book VI of the AeneidM and to Plato's Symposium, regarded in the commentaries of Landino and Ficino as explanations of the gentile prisca theologia, a cosmology parallel to the tenets of Christianity. The first half of the book examines Spenser's representation of the macrocosm and its replication in human nature's lesser world in the light of divergent tendencies within humanism. The legacy of Plato is shown to be especially important in the esoteric tradition, which made the province of natural philosophy part of the soul's itinerary back to its otherworldly origins. In the second half, The Faerie Queene is interpreted as an unfolding pattern: the dynamic order of nature is flawed but not fallen, and seen against that background, human culture contains in its myths and images both corruptions of natural impulses and aspirations to transcend the limits imposed by mortality.

Imperialisms

Imperialisms PDF Author: E. Sauer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403980462
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Filling a major gap in historical, literary, and post-colonial scholarship, Imperialisms examines the identity statements of the world's major imperialisms in multiple theatres of competition over the course of four centuries. Filling a major gap in historical, literary, and post-colonial scholarship, Imperialisms examines early identity statements and nuances of dominance of the world's major imperialisms in various theatres of competition. Developed in collaboration with leading scholars in the field, this book balances historical essays and case studies, and encourages investigations of conversant and competing imperialisms, their practices, and rhetoric of self-justification. Europe (west and east), India, the New World, Africa, and the Far East are among the sites of imperialism featured here, which are analyzed in relation to intersecting debates on politics, religion, literature, nationalism, commerce, conversion, and race. Valuable for preliminary or advanced studies, Imperialisms provides multiple points of entry into and guidelines for a conversation both current and vigorous.