Strategies of Poetic Narrative
Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Eliot

Clare Kinney's original study explores the distinctive narrative strategies of fictions which unfold in the artificial and self-conscious schemes of language bound by poetic form.

Clare Regan Kinney (Author)

9780521107808, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 February 2009

276 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.6 cm, 0.35 kg

It is remarkable that some theoretical developments in narratology have bypassed poetic narratives, concentrating almost exclusively on prose fiction. Clare Kinney's original study aims to redress the balance by exploring the distinctive narrative strategies of fictions which unfold in the artificial and self-conscious schemes of language bound by poetic form. Kinney's close readings of three sophisticated poetic narratives, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Book VI of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Milton's Paradise Lost, suggest that these diverse works are united by a common tendency to exploit the alternative patterns of lyric in order to defer undesirable conclusions and offer subversive counterplots. Finally, an exploration of Eliot's The Waste Land as poetic 'anti-narrative' leads into a consideration of the ways in which poetic fictions employ their various, inherently double designs - in particular their ability to invoke the resources of lyric - to pre-empt unhappy endings by telling at least two stories at the same time.

1. Some strategies of poetic narrative
2. Dilation, design and didacticism in Troilus and Criseyde
3. The end of questing, the quest for an ending: circumscribed vision in The Faerie Queene Book VI
4. Inspired duplicity: the multiple designs of Paradise Lost
5. The ends of poetic narrative
Notes.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS]