Placeholder text

Go to cart

Allegory and Enchantment

By Jason Crawford

Allegory and Enchantment

By Jason Crawford

- Default Title
Description
What is modernity? Where are modernitys points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Allegory and Enchantment explores these broad questions by considering the work of English writers at the threshold of modernity, and by considering,in particular, the cultural forms these writers want to leave behind. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, many English writers fashion themselves as engaged in breaking away from anarray of old idols: magic, superstition, tradition, the sacramental, the medieval. Many of these writers persistently use metaphors of disenchantment, of awakening from a broken spell, to describe their self-consciously modern orientation toward a medieval past. And many of them associate thatrepudiated past with the dynamics and conventions of allegory.
In the hands of the major English practitioners of allegorical narrativeWilliam Langland, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyanallegory shows signs of strain and disintegration. The work of these writers seems to suggest a story of modern emergence in which medieval allegory, with its search for divine order in the material world, breaks down under the pressure of modern disenchantment. But these four early modern writers also make possible other understandings of modernity. Each ofthem turns to allegory as a central organizing principle for his most ambitious poetic projects. Each discovers in the ancient forms of allegory a vital, powerful instrument of disenchantment. Each of them, therefore, opens up surprising possibilities: that allegory and modernity are inescapably linked;that the story of modern emergence is much older than the early modern period; and that the things modernity has tried to repudiatethe old enchantmentsare not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.
Product details
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
238
Release Date:
2017-03-26
Publication Date:
2017-09-21
Publisher:
Oxford University Press (UK)
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0198788045
ISBN13:
9780198788041
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
501 g
Height:
157 cm
Width:
235 cm
Thickness:
17 cm
Buy on Amazon
Currently sold out