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 By Dorothy Stephens
1999 | 266 Pages | ISBN: 0521630649 | PDF | 1 MB
1999 | 266 Pages | ISBN: 0521630649 | PDF | 1 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.