![The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell [Repost]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/ef/f4/0041f4ef_medium.jpg)
The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell [Repost]
![The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell [Repost]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/ef/f4/0041f4ef.jpg)
Dorothy Stephens - The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell
Published: 1999-01-13 | ISBN: 0521630649, 0521034698 | PDF | 264 pages | 1.03 MB
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.