Platonic concerns and conceptions profoundly affected early modern English and continental poetics, yet the effects have had little attention. This book defines Platonism's roles in early modern theories of literature, then turns to reappraise the Platonizing major poet Edmund Spenser. It makes important new contributions to the knowledge of early modern European poetics and advances our understanding of Spenser's role and significance in English literary history. Literary Platonism energized pursuits of the sublime, and knowledge of this approach to poetry yields cogent new understandings of Spenser's poetics, his principal texts, his poetic vocation, and his cultural influence. By combining Christian resources with doctrines of Platonic poetics such as the poet's and lover's inspirational furies, the revelatory significance of beauty, and the importance of imitating exalted ideals rather than the world, he sought to attain a visionary sublimity that would ensure his enduring national significance, and he thereby became a seminal figure in the English literary "line of vision" including Milton and Blake among others. Although readings of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender typically bypass Plato's Phaedrus, this text deeply informs the Calender's treatments of beauty, inspiration, poetry's psychagogic power, and its national responsibilities. In The Faerie Queene, both heroism and visionary poetics arise from the stimuli of love and beauty conceived Platonically, and idealized mimesis produces its faeryland. Faery's queen, projected from Elizabeth I as in Platonic idealization of the beloved, not only pertains to temporal governance but also points toward the transcendental Ideas and divinity. Whereas Plato's Republic valorizes philosophy for bringing enlightenment to counter society's illusions, Spenser champions the learned and enraptured poetic imagination, and proceeds as such a philosopher-poet.

Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism

Literature & Fiction

Borris, Kenneth

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

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

Challenging conventional notions that literary allegorism declined around 1600, Kenneth Borris reassesses the Renaissance relations between allegory and heroic poetry. He concentrates particularly on the major texts of Sidney, Spenser and Milton. Borris offers a fresh approach to the interaction of allegory with literary genres; focusing on epic, he further analyzes the distinctive codes and conventions that constituted the generic repertoire of Renaissance allegorical epic poetry.

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470-1650 (Garland Studies in the Renaissance)

The readings gathered here include many rare texts that have not been reprinted for centuries, excerpted from biblical commentary, legal writings, medical and scientific writings, popular encyclopedias, and literature, as well as continental vernacular and Latin sources never before available in English translation. The selections are assembled in ten chapters addressing particular discursive fields - Theology, Law, Medicine, Astrology, Physiognomics, Encyclopedias and Reference Works, Prodigious Monstrosities, Love and Friendship, the Sapphic Renaissance, and Erotica. Each chapter includes a substantial introduction summarizing its topic and its relation to early modern homoeroticism. The volume also poignantly addresses key issues in Renaissance thinking about sexual identity, and newly clarifies central problems and debates in the historiography of same-sex love.

Routledge

Spenser's Poetics of Prophecy in The Faerie Queen V (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES)

English Literary Studies

Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470-1650

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