The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780521630641)

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.

Author: Dorothy Stephens
ISBN-10: 0521630649
ISBN-13: 9780521630641
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/13/1999
Pages: 264
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.23lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.75d