Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton

by Kenneth Borris

Overview

Challenging conventional notions that literary allegorism declined around 1600, Kenneth Borris reassesses the Renaissance relations between allegory and heroic poetry. He concentrates particularly on the major texts of Sidney, Spenser and Milton. Borris offers a fresh approach to the interaction of allegory with literary genres; focusing on epic, he further analyzes the distinctive codes and conventions that constituted the generic repertoire of Renaissance allegorical epic poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521100090
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/18/2009
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Note on translations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. The formalization of allegory in Heroic poetry; 2. Allegory and the metamorphoses of Heroic form; 3. Reconfiguring the Epic repertoire; 4. Arcadian allegorical epic; 5. Sidneian transformations of Heroic poetry; 6. Arthurian configurations: Spenser's continued Heroic allegorism; 7. Spenser's Heroic allegory and the politics of ennobled virtue; 8. 'Union or communion deified': universal analogies of Milton's pattern-hero; 9. 'So God with man unites': Heroic community in one greater man; 10. 'In mysterious terms judged best': Paradise Lost and allegorical poetics.

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