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

by Kenneth Borris

• ISBN13: 9780521781299
• ISBN10: 0521781299
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-12-04
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Challenging conventional notions that literary allegorism declined precipitously around 1600, Kenneth Borris reassesses the Renaissance relations between allegory and heroic poetry, particularly in the major texts of Sidney, Spenser and Milton. Through wide-ranging consideration of Homeric and Virgilian reception and its influence on both continental and English literary theory, he shows that allegorical epic tended to double for and displace epic throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Borris offers a fresh approach to the interaction of allegory with literary genres; focusing on epic, he further analyses the distinctive codes and conventions that constituted the generic repertoire of Renaissance allegorical epic poetry. Whereas standard literary history assumes Sidney opposes allegory, and that Milton minimizes or rejects it in following Spenser, Borris's detailed readings demonstrate that Sidney and Milton are also major allegorists, and that Spenser remained so even in the latter books of The Faerie Queene.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	x
Note on translations	xii
Introduction	1	(12)
PART ONE ALLEGORY AND EPOS: HOMER TO MILTON
The formalization of allegory in heroic poetry	13	(41)
Allegory and the metamorphoses of heroic form	54	(21)
Reconfiguring the epic repertoire	75	(34)
PART TWO SIDNEY'S ARCADIAS
Arcadian allegorical epic	109	(27)
Sidneian transformations of heroic poetry	136	(9)
PART THREE SPENSER'S FAERIE QUEENE
Arthurian configurations: Spenser's continued heroic allegorism	145	(19)
Spenser's heroic allegory and the politics of ennobled virtue	164	(19)
PART FOUR MILTON'S PARADISE LOST
``Union or communion deified'': universal analogies of Milton's pattern-hero	183	(36)
``So God with man unites'': heroic community in one greater man	219	(25)
``In mysterious terms judged best'': Paradise Lost and allegorical poetics	244	(9)
Notes	253	(56)
Index	309