The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell

ISBN-13: 9780521630641 / Angielski / Twarda / 1998 / 264 str.

Dorothy Stephens

Opis

The poet Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the petrarchan tradition while heightening its dilemmas--flirting with a very different kind of feminine image. Dorothy Stephens shows that this flirtation emerges only in conditional language and situations, and that the eroticism the reader feels often belies a narrator's insistence that it is illusory. She goes on to look at responses to Spenser's eroticism among male and female writers in the seventeenth century.

Recenzje

"Waht the superficial glance misses...this book delights to reveal." Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Spis treści

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Part I. Spenser: 1. Into other arms: Amoret's evasion; 2. 'Newes of devils': feminine sprights in masculine minds; 3. Monstrous intimacy and arrested developments; 4. Narrative flirtations; Part II. Seventeenth-Century Refigurations: 5. 'Who can those vast imaginations feed?': The Concealed Fancies and the price of hunger; 6. Caught in the act at Nun Appleton; Afterword; Notes; Works cited; Index.