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.
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 po...
In 1953, when Dorothy Stephens and her husband lived in married student housing at the University of Michigan, she envisioned a safe, conventional life ahead. She never imagined living in Kenya toward the end of the Mau Mau uprising, plunged into an exotic new world, facing safari ants, wild bees, and a vicious monkey, and discovering a core of strength deep in her security-loving soul.
See Kenya through her eyes in its last tumultuous days as a British colony and witness the transformative effect on her life. Meet the emerging young leaders of the independence movement and the...
In 1953, when Dorothy Stephens and her husband lived in married student housing at the University of Michigan, she envisioned a safe, conventional ...
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.
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 po...
