1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910778871503321

Autore

Stephens Dorothy

Titolo

The limits of eroticism in post-Petrarchan narrative : conditional pleasure from Spenser to Marvell / / Dorothy Stephens [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 1998

ISBN

0-521-03469-8

1-280-16186-8

0-511-11705-1

0-511-15002-4

0-511-30997-X

0-511-48402-X

0-511-05096-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xii, 248 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Collana

Cambridge studies in Renaissance literature and culture ; ; 29

Disciplina

821/.03093538

Soggetti

English poetry - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism

Narrative poetry, English - History and criticism

Erotic poetry, English - History and criticism

Feminism and literature - England - History

English poetry - Italian influences

Renaissance - England

Sex in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 230-241) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Spenser. Into other arms: Amoret's evasion ; "Newes of devils": feminine sprights in masculine minds ; Monstrous intimacy and arrested developments ; Narrative flirtations -- Seventeenth-century refigurations. "Who can those vast imaginations feed?": The concealed fancies and the price of hunger ; Caught in the act at Nun Appleton.

Sommario/riassunto

Although theories of exploitation and subversion have radically changed our understanding of gender in Renaissance literature, to favour only those theories is to risk ignoring productive exchanges between 'masculine' and 'feminine' in Renaissance culture.



'Appropriation' is too simple a term to describe these exchanges - as when Petrarchan lovers flirt dangerously with potentially destructive femininity. Spenser revises this Petrarchan phenomenon, constructing flirtations whose participants are figures of speech, readers or narrative voices. His plots allow such exchanges to occur only through conditional speech, but this very conditionality powerfully shapes his work. Seventeenth-century works - including a comedy by Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, and Upon Appleton House by Andrew Marvell - suggest that the civil war and the upsurge of female writers necessitated a reformulation of conditional erotics.