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The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative : Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)
The Limits of Eroticism in PostPetrarchan Narrative Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell - Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture Author:Dorothy Stephens The poet Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the petrarchan tradition while heightening its dilemmas--flirting with a very different kind of feminine image. Dorothy Stephens shows that this flirtation emerges only in conditional langu... more »age and situations, and that the eroticism the reader feels often belies a narrator's insistence that it is illusory. She goes on to look at responses to Spenser's eroticism among male and female writers in the seventeenth century.« less