Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sokolov, Danila

Titel

'Strange Characters': Inscription and Lyric in Books 3 and 4 of The Faerie Queene

Ist Teil von

• ELH, 2022-06, Vol.89 (2), p.345-376

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This essay considers the intriguing prominence of inscriptions on surfaces such as metal, wood, stone, and flesh in books 3 and 4 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. It argues that in their formal organization, rhetorical configurations, and classical genealogies, these inscriptions replicate the principal characteristics of lyric poetry. In foregrounding the conjunction of language and matter, these lyric inscriptions offer a mechanism of thinking through the nature of poetic creation out of available linguistic resources. As a result, lyric emerges as the foundational form of poetry whose affordances are indispensable to Spenser's epic undertaking.