The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic

by Linda Gregerson

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521034906
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/14/2006
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture , #6
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.67(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

"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

"...a worthy 1990s response to the last two English poetic epics." Diane Parkin-Speer, Sixteenth Century Journal

From the Publisher