| My dissertation studies the interplay of theology and poetics in the major epics of early modern England: The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained. I challenge the opposition between the "Calvinist," "allegorical" Spenser and the "Arminian," "dramatic" Milton by offering a new understanding of their doctrinal affinities and of the tension their works display between literary and religious imperatives. Both poets aimed to stimulate moral improvement in their readers by depicting moral improvement in their heroes and to achieve this didactic end adopted the same structural pattern of dual heroes. Their primary heroes, Arthur and the Son, are pre-eminently powerful and virtuous, but abstract and unsympathetic. Their secondary heroes, Redcrosse and Adam, are weaker and more fallible, but their attractive and realistic personalities encourage our identification with their travails. The reader learns from the career of the secondary hero to imitate the primary hero and thus to approach his otherwise inaccessible perfection.;My Introduction outlines some formal issues arising from multi-hero narrative poems and draws on the Cato and Pompey of Lucan's De Bello Civili to lay out this pattern of dual heroes. Chapter 1 traces the development of these two types in the literary criticism of the Italian Renaissance and describes the theorists' distinction between the idealized hero, typified by Tasso's Goffredo, and the imperfect hero, typified by Dante. Chapter 2 considers the importance of Italian poetics for the structure and characterization of Spenser's epic and offers a complete reading of the theoretically perfect, but still evolving character of Arthur. Chapter 3 compares the model of the dual heroes in The Faerie Queene and in Paradise Lost and discusses the influence of Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and Langland's Piers Plowman. Chapter 4 explores further this comparison by focusing on the crucial moments when the primary heroes and the heroines, Una and Eve, teach the secondary heroes the ethical lessons necessary for their salvation. Chapter 5 applies the model to Paradise Regained and suggests that Jesus represents Milton's attempt to fuse the two types and resolve the artistic and Christological problems in his depiction of the Son in Paradise Lost. |
