Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton by Kenneth Borris

REVIEWS Kenneth Borris. Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance L it­ erature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 320. In modern readings, the moment in Paradise Lost when Satan meets Sin and Death at the gates of Hell is usually held to m ark the decline of the perceived utility of allegory in British literature. Satan’s failure to recognize Sin seems to reveal the failure of allegory as an instructional mode, and when Sin must announce her identity as the “daughter” and “darling” (ii.870) of Satan, we seem satirically referred backwards in literary his­ tory to a time when the devil’s presence was announced on the pageant wagon by his clomping, cloven hooves, his red cape, and his tail and horns. Implicitly, the reading goes, Milton asks us to be better and different readers than allegory requires. As Kenneth Borris rightly points out in Allegory and Epic in E n­ glish Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and M ilton, this interpretation of the meeting of Satan and Sin is part of a long-standing presumption that allegory is always something of the past, less artful and effective than more realist modes of the fashionable present. In this book Borris, effectively undermining this view, shows that allegorical techniques were a vital component of the construction of epic and heroic modes in the English Renaissance and that they contributed significantly to the social and literary modernity of the Arcadias, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. The book is divided into four parts. The first assesses the importance of allegory to the Renaissance understanding of the interpretation of epic and gives an analysis of the modal trans­ formation of early modern epic through the use of allegorical techniques in theory and in practice. For instance, Borris shows th at Sidney, Spenser, and Milton use vocabulary and imagery that work to advance the heroic narrative at the same time as they retain allegorical resonances from their uses in other texts and contexts. In the second and third sections, on Sidney and Spenser, Borris shows how the allegorical elements interact with narrative elements to transform both the abstract meaning that the allegory portends and the reader’s understanding of the heroic action. The chapters on Spenser, for example, first argue that the later Books of the Faerie Queene use allegorical tech­ 727 ESC 28, 2002 niques to create a composite image of heroism, and then show that the effect of the dispersion of virtue that such a construc­ tion entails is to revise epic’s conventional commitment to social hierarchy and noble virtue. The last section, on Milton, accu­ mulates the findings of the previous three to produce a superb reading of the centrality of the incarnated Christ to the struc­ ture and meaning of Paradise Lost. In Borris’s analysis the co­ hesion of M ilton’s epic depends upon the allegorical techniques that the poet uses to disperse the elements of heroism through­ out the created universe at the same time as he condenses them in the figure of Christ. In these last chapters Borris successfully shows that allegory is im portant not because of what it means in terms of one-to-one correspondences, but because of what it does: through allegorical techniques of composite heroism, for example, Milton “seeks to realize a new Christian synthe­ sis that can accommodate the increasing dignity, responsibility, and autonomy attributed to human individuals in seventeenthcentury thought, without sacrificing former notions of collective support for personal identity, and the dependence of the self on ideal external standards of good” (221). Borris’s work here should stimulate more work of substance on this and related topics. As he points out, his reading of Sid­ ney’s prose fiction offers the occasion for a “broad re-assessment” of it, which in turn weighs upon arguments about the origins of the novel and the extent to which it is rooted in realist modes. The interpretations of both The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost are perhaps most im portant in that Borris’s re-readings of their forms entail an impressive re-reading of their politi­ cal and...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.