Allegory and enchantment
Subtitle: an early modern poetics
By: Jason Crawford
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 227
ISBN-13: 9780198788041
Subjects: English literature; History and criticism; Allegory
Description: "Allegory and Enchantment" is about the genealogies of modernity, and about the lingering power of some of the cultural forms against which modernity defines itself: religion, magic, the sacramental, the medieval. Jason Crawford explores the emergence of modernity by investigating the early modern poetics of allegorical narrative, a literary form that many modern writers have taken to be paradigmatically medieval. In four of the most substantial allegorical narratives produced in early modern England-William Langland's Piers Plowman, John Skelton's The Bowge of Courte, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress-allegory is intimately linked with a self-conscious modernity, and with what many commentators have, in the last century, called 'the disenchantment of the world.' The makers of these early modern narratives themselves take a keen interest in metaphors and postures of disenchantment. They fashion themselves as skeptics, spell-breakers, prophets against false institutions and false belief. And they often regard their own allegorical forms as another dangerous enchantment, a residue of the medieval past they have set out to renounce.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-219) and index.