Details

Subject(s)

• English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and criticism [Browse]
• Allegory [Browse]

Summary note

Allegory and Enchantment" is about the genealogies of modernity, and about the lingering power of some of the cultural forms against which modernity defines itself: religion, magic, the sacramental, the medieval. Jason Crawford explores the emergence of modernity by investigating the early modern poetics of allegorical narrative, a literary form that many modern writers have taken to be paradigmatically medieval. In four of the most substantial allegorical narratives produced in early modern England-William Langland's Piers Plowman, John Skelton's The Bowge of Courte, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress-allegory is intimately linked with a self-conscious modernity, and with what many commentators have, in the last century, called 'the disenchantment of the world.' The makers of these early modern narratives themselves take a keen interest in metaphors and postures of disenchantment. They fashion themselves as skeptics, spell-breakers, prophets against false institutions and false belief. And they often regard their own allegorical forms as another dangerous enchantment, a residue of the medieval past they have set out to renounce.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-219) and index.

Contents

• Introduction: A poetics of enchantment
• Genealogies of allegory
• Incarnations of the word: Piers Plowman
• Suspicion and solitude: The bowge of courte
• Violence and apocalypse: The Faerie queene
• Selfhood and secularity The Pilgrim's process.

Show 3 more Contents items

ISBN

• 9780198788041 ((hardcover))
• 0198788045 ((hardcover))

LCCN

2016942385

OCLC

955313081

Statement on language in description

Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage. Read more...