scholarly journals "The Wombe's Burden": The Undermining of Female Agency within Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Delane Just
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Ultimate Purpose

Through their depictions of Eve and Britomart, Milton and Spenser undermine the agency of their female characters and perpetuate and preserve patriarchal values and hierarchy. Britomart, at once a strong martial knight, is undermined by Spenser’s tying of her ultimate purpose and goal to her ability to birth a noble lineage into existence. Milton’s Eve, while being a more positive depiction than her predecessors, is intended to be subservient to Adam and her purpose lies in copulation and procreation. Ultimately, while both texts do give their characters some agency beyond procreation, it is imperative to recognize the historical degradation of women to wombs, and how this still affects women to the modern-day.

‘A place pickt out by choyce of best alyue,/That natures worke by art can imitate’: the Bowre of Blisse and Armida’s garden revisited

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Faerie Queene

The second chapter focuses on the best-known and most extensive imitation of Tasso’s poem in all of English literature, Spenser’s re-imagining and re-working of Armida’s enchanted garden in cantos 15 and 16 as the Bowre of Blisse in the final canto of Book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1590). Spenser’s almost immediate engagement with Gerusalemme liberata in his own romantic epic has long seen him acknowledged as ‘the arbiter of Tasso’s glory in the first half century of his life in England’. However, despite the voluminous critical work on Spenser’s episode and its sources, the profound indebtedness to Tasso throughout has, surprisingly, still not been fully appreciated and acknowledged. The second chapter of this study therefore offers a detailed re-appraisal of the complex relationship between the two episodes, to try to underline the sustained imitative virtuosity of Spenser’s emulation of his principal Italian source. The chapter also includes a brief consideration of Milton’s indebtedness to Tasso’s episode, and Spenser’s earlier imitation of it, in the poetic evocation of Eden in Book 4 of Paradise Lost.

Christians and Adversaries in the Evolving Norton Anthology of English Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne Glausser
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Christian Beliefs

This chapter examines fifty years of evolving annotations in the influential Norton Anthology of English Literature. As editors provide information about canonical works that aim to present Christian truth—like The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost—they find themselves entangled with an increasingly secular literary world. Notes from earlier editions tend to reflect the perspective of a Christian insider; later editions gradually revise these notes to reflect a more secular literary landscape and to attract the broadest possible audience. The chapter studies these effects by focusing on three “adversaries” to Christianity (as seen by many traditional Christians): Milton’s Satan, Islam, and queer sexuality. Later editions of Norton secularize the anthology by excising or revising notes that endorse or privilege Christian beliefs, but the new notes are not belief-neutral in any simple sense.

scholarly journals National Poets, the Status of the Epic and the Strange Case of Master William Shakespeare

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (28) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Paul Innes
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
High Status ◽  
The Status ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Faerie Queene

This essay contextualises Shakespeare as product of a field of forces encapsulating national identity and relative cultural status. It begins by historicising the production of national poets in Romantic and Nationalist terms. Lefevere’s conceptual grid is then used to characterise the system that underpins the production of Shakespeare as British national poet, and his place within the canon of world literature. The article defines this context first before moving onto the figure of Shakespeare, by referring to various high status texts such as the Kalevala, the Aeneid, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. The position accorded Shakespeare at the apex is therefore contingent upon a series of prior operations on other texts, and their writers. Shakespeare is not conceived as attaining pre-eminence because of his own innate literary qualities. Rather, a process of elimination occurs by which the common ascription of the position of national poet to a writer of epic is shown to be a cultural impossibility for the British. Instead, via Aristotle’s privileging of tragedy over epic, the rise of Shakespeare is seen as almost a second choice because of the inappropriateness of Spenser and Milton for the position.

The Faerie Queene

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Of Reformed Versifying

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Native Form ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
English Verse ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Stylistic Ideal

This chapter examines how the development of English poetry in the second half of the sixteenth century is characterized by the search for an appropriate style. In this context, ‘reformed versifying’ may be understood as a reconciliation of high and low in which the common is reconfigured as a stylistic ideal of the mean. That development can be traced in debates about prosody where an alternative sense of ‘reformed versifying’ as adapting classical metres to English verse is rejected in favour of native form. At the same time Sidney recuperates poetry by reforming it as an agent of virtue. Reformation and Renaissance finally come together in Spenser, who realizes Erasmus’ aim of harmonizing the values of classical literature with Christian doctrine, and reconciles the foreign and the ‘homewrought’. The Faerie Queene of 1590 represents the triumph of the mean in both style and, through its celebration of marriage, in substance.

Cain’s Castles

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Acts And Monuments

In Chapter 1, the Reformation is presented as the paradigmatic site of Gothic escape: the evil monastery can be traced back to Wycliffe’s ‘Cain’s castles’ and the fictional abbey ruin to the Dissolution. Central Gothic tropes are shown to have their origin in this period: the Gothic heroine is compared to the female martyrs of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments; the usurper figure is linked to the papal Antichrist; and the element of continuation and the establishment of the true heir is related to Reformation historiography, which needs to prove that the Protestant Church is in continuity with early Christianity—this crisis of legitimacy is repeated in the Glorious Revolution. Lastly, Gothic uncovering of hypocrisy is allied to the revelation of Catholicism as idolatry. The Faerie Queene is interpreted as a mode of Protestant Gothic and Spenser’s Una provides an allegorical gesture of melancholic distance, which will be rendered productive in later Gothic fiction.

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