scholarly journals Writing and Weaving: The Textual and the Textile in Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene, III.i

Sederi ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Joan Curbet Soler
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Double Movement ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Most often, Ovidian allusions are woven into Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Books I–III, 1590) without developing into an open re-telling of myths. One significant exception occurs in Book III, Canto 1: there the action comes to a temporary stop in order to make space for a detailed description of the tapestry in the hall of Castle Joyous, which depicts the story of Venus and Adonis. This article intends to offer a reading of that episode that focuses on the importance of materiality and self-reflexivity as keys to its significance at the opening of Book III, and in the larger structure of The Faerie Queene. Here, the descriptive powers of the poet are both foregrounded and questioned, in a double movement of ekphrasis which gestures towards a serious interrogation of the value of representation, both in poetry and the visual arts. Implicitly, it is the poet (and through him, the reader him/herself) that must question his/her role and participation in the gradual and often painful awareness of the body that is foregrounded throughout Book III.

The Psychology of Memory in Spenser's Faerie Queene

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-96
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Boughner
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
World City ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Extended Treatment ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Faerie Queene

From Plato and Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, through the medieval commentators, the Elizabethans inherited a body of complex psychological principles. An examination of these principles and their bearing on The Faerie Queene has so far been only casual and incidental. Since in Book ii, Canto ix, the poet combines one of the most widely used of medieval motifs—the conception of the body as a world, city, or castle—with certain current doctrines of psychology, such an inquiry is especially apposite. Spenser's use of the abundant contemporaneous literature of psychology affords material for an extended treatment such as that which Miss Anderson has made of Shakespeare's plays. The present study purposes to set forth one aspect of his system of psychology—his psychology of memory in the allegory of the Castle of Alma, to make clear the relationship of his system to the current Elizabethan doctrines, and to establish the purpose of certain departures from those doctrines.

Mutability and Mortality in The Faerie Queene

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith H. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Staged Construction ◽  
The Cantos ◽  
Death Of The Soul ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos engage the subjects of sin and death from start to finish—from the introduction of Mutability herself through the end of her pageant—but Spenser’s Mutability is neither a simple mirror of the Fall nor a metonymic encoding of it. The Cantos open with a staged construction of Mutabilility’s figure, and her story draws on numerous renderings of change, including the Bible, Ovid, Lucretius, and Boethius, without merely repeating any one. Related passages on sin and death in The Faerie Queene, books I and II, have particularly relevant, significant ties to the subjects of time and mortality in the Cantos, as well as to questions of narrative and figuration. Mutability’s pageant explicitly engages with mortalism, the death of the soul, or the individual soul, along with the body, a concern that makes sense as an offshoot of Spenser’s engagement with materialism elsewhere in his epic. (This is another preview of Milton as well.)

Sexual Generation and the “two-bodied” shapes of creatures in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Moreana ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 43 & 44 (Number (4 & 1-2) ◽  
pp. 150-177
Author(s):  
Emilien Mohsen
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Female Representation ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Sexual Generation ◽  
The One ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Bodily Representation

This article follows an aspect of Spenser’s structure of the The Faerie Queene, namely that of duality, to discuss how the notion of the body is treated. This representation gives way to doubleness, if not to say problematic expression of bipolarity, someties as both male and female figures, in the process of “sexual” regeneration or creation. The article, thus, mostly highlights the role of Britomart, the heroine of Book III, and Artegall, hero of Book V, as the one is presented in an armour, brandishing a “phallic” lance, and the other is introduced in a woman’s attire. In both of them, therefore, one finds the principle of the duality of bodily representation, or as Pico della Mirandola has it, that the male and female representation can be seen as “two powers in the same substance.”

Lear, Land and Expropriation without Compensation

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Haresnape
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Human Cell ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
The Body ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Faerie Queene

King Lear has been extensively used by Shakespearean critics in South Africa for the discussion of land ownership issues. This essay alludes to the work of Martin Orkin and Nicholas Visser, who brought postcolonial and materialistic critiques to bear upon the play in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The essay itself carries the investigation forward to present times, when the text asks to be read in relation to expropriation without compensation: a land proposal being ventilated at the highest political level. The issues which emerge are diverse and unexpected. King Lear’s gifts of land to his daughters are actually ‘deals’ requiring the compensation of their public declarations of love for him. For various reasons this strategy fails. The reader is then invited by the play’s imagery to see the body of the old king as a piece of ‘real estate’ that is incrementally expropriated by the ageing process and the onset of dementia. Spenser’s allegory of the House of Temperance in Book II of The Faerie Queene is discussed as a likely influence here. By the end of the play, Lear is divested of his own bodily health and cognitive ability by the arch expropriator, ‘time’, and its subaltern, the fallible human cell. With regard to critical reception, this essay argues that King Lear has complexity and substance enough to engage the interest of postcolonialists, materialists and universalists alike – even in relation to a topic as specific as land.

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

The Faerie Queene

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene
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