By Amelia A. Zurcher
Overturning the typical characterization of seventeenth-century English prose romance as an exhausted, imitative style with little touching on the evolution of the unconventional, this booklet argues for the centrality of seventeenth-century romance in key political and ethical philosophical debates of its time. Concentrating particularly at the intersection among romance and the overdue humanist challenge of self-interest, the booklet discerns the deeply ethical philosophical point of prose romances from Sidney's Arcadia, via Wroth's Urania and Barclay's Argenis, to the dozen or so now little-known Royalist romances from the mid-seventeenth century. The e-book should be of specific curiosity to students and scholars of the background of prose fiction and the unconventional, early sleek women's writing, and people eager about the political valences of style and the intersections among literature and ethical philosophy.
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Extra resources for Seventeenth-Century English Romance: Allegory, Ethics, and Politics
Sample text
For allegory was now sometimes on the wrong side of the moral divide, allied with irony rather than offering heroic resistance to it. One solution to this representational crisis was to reassert allegory’s total alignment with the identificatory, a strategy adopted with rigorous thoroughness, for instance, in Nathaniel Ingelo’s very popular 1660 romance Bentivolio and Urania. ”22 Elsewhere in the introduction he offers a long metaphor in which Reason whips Fancy as punishment for the “long stories” and “Fooleries” with which it interrupts the steady accrual of meaning in most fiction (b3v).
Allegory and Irony Broadly speaking, the post-Romantic critical tradition has tended to condemn literary allegory for drastically narrowing the space left to the literal, the images and plot the writer conjures on the page. Allegory, it is said, moves us straight to the conceptual, or, less often but by a similar logic, straight to history. Too much occupied with idea, or too slavishly devoted to fact, by this still mainly Coleridgean logic literary allegory makes no room for the exercise of the imagination, either writer’s or reader’s, and as such it is not really literature.
The courtly context of allegory apparently makes it impossible that one might mean what one says, that allegory might be polysemic. Instead it is ironic, in one of two ways: either it is an inversion of what is ostensibly said, an inversion governed by the intention of the speaker, or it is non-sense, with no connection to intention or to meaning. Puttenham’s model in conceiving the relation between irony and allegory is Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, which presents irony as for the most part a subset of allegory.