This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.

This book is a study of Spenser's conception of the nature of heroism and the way it is embodied in the separate books of The Faerie Queene. Professor Evans stresses the coherence of Spenser's scheme of virtues and examines the fusion of Christian symbol and classic myth through which the underlying Christian theme is expressed. He emphasises the didactic purpose of the poem, and the rhetorical method by which the allegory works upon the reader. It is his contention that Spenser completed his poem, and that The Faerie Queene as it stands presents an organic unity so firmly controlled that it is unprofitable to consider any book, canto or even single verse isolation from the poem as a whole. The complexity of the poetry which this study reveals suggests that Spenser has much in common with the metaphysicals, while the subtle dissection of human motive and behaviour within the poem would place him in closer relationship to the drama than is normally recognised.

This book offers the first full study of the challenges posed to an emerging English nationalism that stemmed from the powerful appeal exerted by the leaders of the international Protestant cause. By considering a range of texts, including poetry, plays, pamphlets, and religious writing, the study reads this heroic tradition as a 'connected literary history,' a project shared by Protestants throughout Northern Europe, which opened up both collaboration among writers from these different regions and new possibilities for communal identification. The work’s central claim is that a pan-Protestant literary field existed in the period, which was multilingual, transnational, and ideologically charged. Celebrated leaders such as William of Orange posed a series of questions, especially for English Protestants, over the relationship between English and Protestant identity. In formulating their role as co-religionists, writers often undercut notions of alterity, rendering early modern conceptions of foreignness especially fluid and erasing national borders.

The Practical Vision: Essays in English Literature in Honour of Flora Roy contains essays offered as a tribute on the occasion of Dr. Flora Roy’s retirement as a Canadian university teacher of English. These essays reflect the literary interests and administrative activities of Dr. Roy and demonstrate the relationship between literature and the perennial human urge to achieve understanding and control of both the subjective and objective worlds.

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is among the most important literary products of the Elizabethan age, and the vast sweep of its moral, political and social concerns tells us more about the age than any other work. This volume, first published in 1989, offers detailed readings of each of the poem’s seven books, along with introductory chapters on Spenser’s career, and the roots of the poem in the English and continental traditions. Humphrey Tonkin pays particular attention to the work’s political and cultural role and its contribution to the development of Elizabethan ideology. A comprehensive analysis, this reissue will be of particular value to literature students and academics alike.

Thorough study of the essential interdependence of the pastoral and epic genres. Proceeds historically from Virgil tracing the evolution of the heroic toward the increasing accommodation of the pastoral. Establishes principles for interpreting the works of major poets who set out to resolve the tensions between imagination and reality, contemplation and action, poetry and prophecy.

"The myth of Sisyphus symbolizes the archetypal process of becoming without the consolation of absolute achievement. It is both a poignant reflection of the human condition and a prominent framing text for classical, medieval, and renaissance theories of human perfectibility. In this unique reading of the myth through classical philosophies, pagan and Christian religious doctrines, and medieval and renaissance literature, we see Sisyphus, "the most cunning of human beings," attempting to transcend his imperfections empowered by his imagination to renew his faith in the infinite potentialities of human excellence."--BOOK JACKET