Research Catalog

Moral fiction in Milton and Spenser

Title: Moral fiction in Milton and Spenser / John M. Steadman.
Author: Steadman, John M.
Publication: Columbia : University of Missouri Press, ©1995.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	PR3592.E8 S84 1995	Off-site

Details

Description

200 pages; 24 cm

Summary

In Moral Fiction in Milton and Spenser, John M. Steadman examines how Milton and Spenser - and Renaissance poets in general - applied their art toward the depiction of moral and historical "truth." Steadman centers his study on the various poetic techniques of illusion that these poets employed in their effort to bridge the gap between truth and imaginative fiction. Emphasizing the significant affinities and the crucial differences between the seventeenth-century heroic poet and his sixteenth-century "original," Steadman analyzes the diverse ways in which Milton and Spenser exploited traditional invocation formulas and the commonplaces of the poet's divine imagination. Steadman suggests that these poets, along with most other Renaissance poets, did not actually regard themselves as divinely inspired but, rather, resorted to a common fiction to create the appearance of having special insight into the truth. The first section of this study traces the persona of the inspired poet in DuBartas's La Sepmaine and in The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. Reevaluating the views of twentieth-century critics, it emphasizes the priority of conscious fiction over autobiographical "fact" in these poets' adaptations of this topos. The second section develops the contrast between the two principal heroic poems of the English Renaissance, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, in terms of the contrasting aesthetic principles underlying the romance genre and the neoclassical epic.

Subject

Genre/Form

Adaptations.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 167-195) and index.

Contents

Part I: "Bardic voices"? moral vision and the persona of the poet: a revaluation -- Enthousiasmos and the persona of the inspired poet: DuBartas and Spenser -- Enthousiasmos and the persona of the inspired poet: Milton -- Part II: Poetic structure and moral vision -- Determinate and indeterminate structures: epic and romance -- Dissolution and restructuring: space and time in The faerie queene -- Spenser's icon of the past: fiction as history, a reexamination -- The "Platonic telescope": narrative and moral focus in The faerie queene -- Moral fiction in Milton's epic plot.

ISBN

0826210171
9780826210173

LCCN

95012810

OCLC

ocm32469691
32469691
SCSB-14695809

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library