The Donna Angelica and the British Enlightenment Poets

Six Studies from Butler to Crabbe
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-032-48001-5
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 176 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 417 g

Reihe: 21st Century Perspectives on British Literature and Society

The aim of the book is to propose new interpretations of poets who are among the most valued and discussed in the British Enlightenment. In fulfilling its aim, the book covers English poetry—and intellectual history—from the Restoration to the later eighteenth century. It examines how the myth of the donna angelica (the angelic lady), ancient in origin but given its best-known form within the medieval literature of fin’amor, lives on beyond the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the Enlightenment. To be more precise, it studies how some major Augustan poets appropriate and recreate what, for convenience, can be called the donna angelica topos (or, the angelic lady motif). They do so for a great many reasons linked with quite diverse circumstances. Nevertheless, the myth’s intellectual richness, emotional intensity, and inherent ambiguities mean that it offers each of them a powerful way for articulating, interpreting, exploring refractions of eros—whether singly or diversely directed, concerned with sexuality or spirituality, informing personal or public experience. The myth has as many faces, so to speak, as does desire; it is one and yet many. Thus, the book pursues a particular fable of eros that appears in a multiplicity of texts in a multiplicity of guises. It studies how some of the most interesting poets from Dryden to Crabbe bring the angelic lady motif into modernity.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cousins, A. D.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction

2. Samuel Butler: Hudibras and the Lady

3. The Donna Angelica in John Dryden’s ‘To the Lady Castlemaine’ and Other Writings, Chiefly to Patronesses

4. Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift: Belinda, and the Unfortunate Lady; Celia, Chloe, and Stella

5. Samuel Johnson: Stella, Irene and Aspasia

6. George Crabbe. The Library and The Village: Old Myths Made New; Old Myths Abandoned

7. Afterword

Index

Über Autor(innen)

A.D. Cousins is Emeritus Professor of English at Macquarie University. He is the author or co-author of many books on early modern British literature and culture.