Book: The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell
Author: Stephens Dorothy
Pages: 264
Format: PDF
Language: English
ISBN10: 0521034698
The poet Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the petrarchan tradition while heightening its dilemmas--flirting with a very different kind of feminine image. Dorothy Stephens shows that this flirtation emerges only in conditional language and situations, and that the eroticism the reader feels often belies a narrator's insistence that it is illusory. She goes on to look at responses to Spenser's eroticism among male and female writers in the seventeenth century.
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