
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
This work investigates the relationship between the development of early modern poetics and the historical process of disenchantment. Jason Crawford, a scholar of early modern literature, examines how the allegorical form functions as both a tool for and a critique of modernity. By analyzing key texts from the period, he argues that early modern writers utilized allegory to navigate the tension between their medieval heritage and the emerging secular, skeptical worldview.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars recognize this text as a significant contribution to the study of early modern intellectual history and the evolution of literary form. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose, which is tailored for specialists in literary theory and historical poetics.
Page Count:
227
Publication Date:
2017-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0191833487
ISBN-13:
9780191833489
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