From Ariosto to Milton: Generic composition in Renaissance epic

Many critics have noted Spenser's and Milton's creative use of the epic tradition and their extensive incorporation of non-epic materials in the Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. Much less attention has been paid to the nature and meaning of the poems' systems of opposing epic and non-epic forms. This study proposes that we can gain a clearer understanding of the poets' methods and of Spenser's profound influence on Milton if we view generic oppositions as constituents of a semiotic process and consider the two epics' reworking of generic traditions as means to adapt a composite genre to new ideological requirements.;Chapter One, "The Epic Genre in the Renaissance," outlines a model of genre based on the Russian Formalist notion of the "dominant" and Bakhtin's theory of the "chronotope." An examination of Vergil's Aeneid and medieval romance reveals the chronotopic systems of epic and romance that Renaissance poets inherited and put to use in the generic semiotics of their heroic poems. Ariosto's Orlando Furioso is considered in some detail, since it established an influential method for systematically opposing the two genres within an epic. Chapter Two, "Spenser's Legend of Holiness: The Reformation of Ariostan Epic," focuses on ways in which Spenser, in Book I of the Faerie Queene, adapted Ariosto's method's to a Protestant worldview less compatible with epic's teleological and omphalic chronotope. After suffering the confusions of a radically decentered world, Redcrosse is seen to "frame" his life in epic wholeness, only to then have this heroic self-fashioning and genre-defining action subverted. In Chapter Three, "Heuristic Copia: The Organization of the Faerie Queene," the lessons of Book I, which include a problematic relation between Wholeness and Truth, are applied to the poem's larger structural gestures. Several parts of the poem's apparatus of heuristic bounty are discussed, including its subtextual Heracleid, its generative dialogue of allegorical cores and textural centers, and the endless argument created by its varied scales of isomorphic units. In Chapter Four, I then argue that Milton's assimilation of Spenser's innovations in Paradise Lost can be seen in his use of chronotopic structures to counterpoint epic's causal-progressive narrative against an argument relying on types and antitypes. The heaven of Paradise Lost offers an ideal spatio-temporality against which the aspirations of Satan and the first parents are evaluated. It is shown that Satan and Eve are linked by their shared misapplication of positive values, in which they attempt to substitute the self for epic's cosmic center.