Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton

by Judith H. Anderson

Overview

Judith H. Anderson conceives the intertext as a relation between or among texts that encompasses both Kristevan intertextuality and traditional relationships of influence, imitation, allusion, and citation. Like the Internet, the intertext is a state, or place, of potential expressed in ways ranging from deliberate emulation to linguistic free play. Relatedly, the intertext is also a convenient fiction that enables examination of individual agency and sociocultural determinism. Anderson's intertext is allegorical because Spenser's Faerie Queene is pivotal to her study and because allegory, understood as continued or moving metaphor, encapsulates, even as it magnifies, the process of signification. Her title signals the variousness of an intertext extending from Chaucer through Shakespeare to Milton and the breadth of allegory itself. Literary allegory, in Anderson's view, is at once a mimetic form and a psychic one-a process thinking that combines mind with matter, emblem with narrative, abstraction with history. Anderson's first section focuses on relations between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Spenser's The Faerie Queene, including the role of the narrator, the nature of the textual source, the dynamics of influence, and the bearing of allegorical narrative on lyric vision. The second centers on agency and cultural influence in a variety of Spenserian and medieval texts. Allegorical form, a recurrent concern throughout, becomes the pressing issue of section three. This section treats plays and poems of Shakespeare and Milton and includes two intertextually relevant essays on Spenser.How Paradise Lost or Shakespeare's plays participate in allegorical form is controversial. Spenser's experiments with allegory revise its form, and this intervention is largely what Shakespeare and Milton find in his poetry and develop. Anderson's book, the result of decades of teaching and writing about allegory, especially Spenserian allegory, will reorient thinking about fundamental critical issues and the landmark texts in which they play themselves out.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823228485
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	01/03/2011
Edition description:	3
Pages:	452
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Judith H. Anderson is Chancellor's Professor of English at Indiana University.

Table of Contents

Prior Publication     ix
Introduction: Reading the Allegorical Intertext     1
Allegorical Reflections of The Canterbury Tales in The Faerie Queene
Chaucer's and Spenser's Reflexive Narrators     27
What Comes after Chaucer's But in The Faerie Queene     42
"Pricking on the plaine": Spenser's Intertextual Beginnings and Endings     54
Allegory, Irony, Despair: Chaucer's Pardoner's and Franklin's Tales and Spenser's Faerie Queene, Books I and III     61
Eumnestes' "immortall scrine": Spenser's Archive     79
Spenser's Use of Chaucer's Melibee: Allegory, Narrative, History     91
Agency, Allegory, and History within the Spenserian Intertext
Spenser's Muiopotmos and Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale     109
Arthur and Argante: Parodying the Ideal Vision     126
Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and Refractions of a Veiled Venus in The Faerie Queene     135
The Antiquities of Fairyland and Ireland     154
Better a mischief than an inconvenience: "The saiying self" in Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland     168
Spenserian Allegory in the Intertexts of Shakespeare and Milton
The Conspiracy of Realism: Impasse and Vision in The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's King Lear     183
Venus and Adonis: Spenser, Shakespeare, and the Forms of Desire     201
Flowers and Boars:Surmounting Sexual Binarism in Spenser's Garden of Adonis     214
Androcentrism and Acrasian Fantasies in the Bower of Bliss     224
Beyond Binarism: Eros/Death and Venus/Mars in Antony and Cleopatra and The Faerie Queene     239
Patience and Passion in Shakespeare and Milton     259
"Real or Allegoric" in Herbert and Milton: Thinking through Difference     272
Spenser and Milton: The Mind's Allegorical Place     280
Notes     321
Index     423

Editorial Reviews

...an impressive collection of seventeen of Judith Anderson's previously published articles...

Renaissance Quarterly

Reading the Allegorical Intertext gives rich attention to its four authors—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton—although Spenser, who plays a major part in seventeen of the nineteen chapters, remains at the heart of the book.

Shakespeare Quarterly

A collection of essays written over a distinguished critic's career. . .

Studies in English Literature

Exemplary. Anderson is patient but never dull as she sifts the textural and historical evidence out of which her readings are constructed.

University of South Carolina - David Lee Miller

A landmark contribution to work on the epochal transformations of medieval into Renaissance and early modern writing cultures.

Macalester College - Theresa Krier

Reading the Allegorical Intertext gives rich attention to its four authors-Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton-although Spenser, who plays a major part in seventeen of the nineteen chapters, remains at the heart of the book.

A collection of essays written over a distinguished critic's career. . .

...an impressive collection of seventeen of Judith Anderson's previously published articles...-Melanie Ord

From the Publisher

A first-rate scholar-critic at the peak of her form.

Cornell University - William J. Kennedy