The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell [Hardcover]

Alternative forms of eroticism in post-Petrarchan English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the petrarchan tradition while heightening its dilemmas, flirting with a very different kind of feminine image. Dorothy Stephens shows that this flirtation emerges only in conditional language and situations, creating an eroticism which the narrator nevertheless insists is illusory. She goes on to look at responses to Spenser's eroticism among male and female writers in the seventeenth century.Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the petrarchan tradition while heightening its dilemmas, flirting with a very different kind of feminine image. Dorothy Stephens shows that this flirtation emerges only in conditional language and situations, creating an eroticism which the narrator nevertheless insists is illusory. She goes on to look at responses to Spenser's eroticism among male and female writers in the seventeenth century.The poet Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the petrarchan tradition while heightening its dilemmas--flirting with a very different kind of feminine image. Dorothy Stephens shows that this flirtation emerges only in conditional language and situations, and that the eroticism the reader feels often belies a narrator's insistence that it is illusory. She goes on to look at responses to Spenser's eroticism among male and female writers in the seventeenth century.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 flirtationlc‰