English Language and Literature ETDs

Enid Howarth

Publication Date

6-5-1967

Abstract

This dissertation relies heavily upon two assumptions: first, that the allegorical habit of mind pervaded the Renaissance in England (as well, of course, as in Italy) as a viable and unquestioned inheritance of the Middle Ages; second, that a close reading of the text of a Renaissance writer (in this case, the two central books of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene) can illuminate various facets of this habit of mind and shed light on some of the intellectually accepted modes of thought which pervade the whole work as well as other works from the same period. The method is more that of the art historians—Wind, Seznec, Panofsky, Gombrich, etc.—than of the literary critics, though techniques have been borrowed from the latter as well as the former. It is a movement forward and backward, an attempt to use the philosophical underpinnings of the age to understand the work; and an attempt to understand the mentality of the age by a close reading of the work. If the method proves useful, both the age and the work should be illuminated.

Degree Name

English

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

English

First Committee Member (Chair)

Franklin Miller Dickey

Second Committee Member

Edith Buchanan

Third Committee Member

Katherine Gauss Simons

Fourth Committee Member

Bainbridge Bunting

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

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