Spenser's International Style

David Scott Wilson-Okamura reframes long-standing questions about Edmund Spenser's style in the wider context of long-term, European trends.

David Scott Wilson-Okamura (Author)

9781107559431, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 October 2015

250 pages, 2 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.36 kg

'… can be read with both profit and pleasure by anyone interested in the practice and theory of poetry.' Jean R. Brink, The Sixteenth Century Journal

Why did Spenser write his epic, The Faerie Queene, in stanzas instead of a classical meter or blank verse? Why did he affect the vocabulary of medieval poets such as Chaucer? Is there, as centuries of readers have noticed, something lyrical about Spenser's epic style, and if so, why? In this accessible and wide-ranging study, David Scott Wilson-Okamura reframes these questions in a larger, European context. The first full-length treatment of Spenser's poetic style in more than four decades, it shows that Spenser was English without being insular. In his experiments with style, Spenser faced many of the same problems, and found some of the same solutions, as poets writing in other languages. Drawing on classical rhetoric and using concepts that were developed by literary critics during the Renaissance, this is an account of long-term, international trends in style, illustrated with examples from Petrarch, Du Bellay, Ariosto and Tasso.

Introduction: the persistence of form
1. Why stanzas for epic?
2. Historical assessments
3. Flowery style
4. Triumph of the flowery style
5. Ornamentalism
6. Private virtues, comic style
Epilogue
Index of names, subjects, and sources.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literary studies: general [DSB]