The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative
Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell

Alternative forms of eroticism in post-Petrarchan English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Dorothy Stephens (Author)

9780521630641, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 November 1998

264 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.56 kg

"Waht the superficial glance misses...this book delights to reveal." Journal of English and Germanic Philology

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.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Spenser: 1. Into other arms: Amoret's evasion
2. 'Newes of devils': feminine sprights in masculine minds
3. Monstrous intimacy and arrested developments
4. Narrative flirtations
Part II. Seventeenth-Century Refigurations: 5. 'Who can those vast imaginations feed?': The Concealed Fancies and the price of hunger
6. Caught in the act at Nun Appleton
Afterword
Notes
Works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]