Reading the allegorical intertext : Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton / Judith H. Anderson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Anderson, Judith H.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599. Faerie queene.

Spenser, Edmund.

Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400. Canterbury tales.

Chaucer, Geoffrey.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. King Lear.

Shakespeare, William.

Milton, John, 1608-1674--Criticism and interpretation.

Milton, John.

English literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

English literature.

Intertextuality.

Symbolism in literature.

Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (449 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Judith H. Anderson conceives the intertext as a relation between or among texts that encompasses both Kristevan intertextuality and traditional relationships of influence, imitation, allusion, and citation. Like the Internet, the intertext is a state, or place, of potential expressed in ways ranging from deliberate emulation to linguistic free play. Relatedly, the intertext is also a convenient fiction that enables examination of individual agency and sociocultural determinism. Anderson’s intertext is allegorical because Spenser’s Faerie Queene is pivotal to her study and because allegory, understood as continued or moving metaphor, encapsulates, even as it magnifies, the process of signification. Her title signals the variousness of an intertext extending from Chaucer through Shakespeare to Milton and the breadth of allegory itself. Literary allegory, in Anderson’s view, is at once a mimetic form and a psychic one—a process thinking that combines mind with matter, emblem with narrative, abstraction with history. Anderson’s first section focuses on relations between Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, including the role of the narrator, the nature of the textual source, the dynamics of influence, and the bearing of allegorical narrative on lyric vision. The second centers on agency and cultural influence in a variety of Spenserian and medieval texts. Allegorical form, a recurrent concern throughout, becomes the pressing issue of section three. This section treats plays and poems of Shakespeare and Milton and includes two intertextually relevant essays on Spenser.How Paradise Lost or Shakespeare’s plays participate in allegorical form is controversial. Spenser’s experiments with allegory revise its form, and this intervention is largely what Shakespeare and Milton find in his poetry and develop. Anderson’s book, the result of decades of teaching and writing about allegory, especially Spenserian allegory, will reorient thinking about fundamental critical issues and the landmark texts in which they play themselves out.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Prior Publication

Introduction. Reading the Allegorical Intertext

1. Chaucer’s and Spenser’s Reflexive Narrators

2. What Comes After Chaucer’s But in The Faerie Queene

3. ‘‘Pricking on the plaine’’: Spenser’s Intertextual Beginnings and Endings

4. Allegory, Irony, Despair: Chaucer’s Pardoner’s and Franklin’s Tales and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Books I and III

5. Eumnestes’ ‘‘immortall scrine’’: Spenser’s Archive

6. Spenser’s Use of Chaucer’s Melibee: Allegory, Narrative, History

7. Spenser’s Muiopotmos and Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale

8. Arthur and Argante: Parodying the Ideal Vision

9. Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and Refractions of a Veiled Venus in The Faerie Queene

10. The Antiquities of Fairyland and Ireland

11. Better a mischief than an inconvenience: ‘‘The saiyng self ’’ in Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland

12. The Conspiracy of Realism: Impasse and Vision in The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s King Lear

13. Venus and Adonis: Spenser, Shakespeare, and the Forms of Desire

14. Flowers and Boars: Surmounting Sexual Binarism in Spenser’s Garden of Adonis

15. Androcentrism and Acrasian Fantasies in the Bower of Bliss

16. Beyond Binarism: Eros/Death and Venus/Mars in Antony and Cleopatra and The Faerie Queene

17. Patience and Passion in Shakespeare and Milton

18. ‘‘Real or Allegoric’’ in Herbert and Milton: Thinking through Difference

19. Spenser and Milton: The Mind’s Allegorical Place

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9786612698798

9780823228515

0823228517

9780823241125

0823241122

9780823246694

0823246698

9781282698796

1282698796

9780823238132

082323813X

9780823228492

0823228495

OCLC:

730040860