Epic, simile, allegory: Problem in the reception of Spenser and Milton

Spenser's Faerie Queene has always been upheld to be allegorical, whereas Milton's Paradise Lost has not generally been received as such. The Miltonic simile has generated a mountain of scholarship, whereas the body of critical literature on the Spenserian simile is relatively slender, considering that The Faerie Queene uses far more extended comparisons than Paradise Lost. Is there a connection between these two facts of reception? The following dissertation addresses the intersection of three fields of discourse in order to probe the relationship between similes in long narrative poems and allegory.;Allegory had long been associated with extended metaphor when viewed from the perspective of the writer, though modernist critics of Spenser first observed that, from the perspective of the reader, the relationship of allegory to its meaning was structured as a simile. After tracing an eclectic history for the reception of epic similes, I embark on the close reading of several examples in order to develop a post-modernist hypothesis that Spenser's comparisons are allegorical and Milton's, ironic.;Because Spenser very closely follows the models set by forebears when he illuminates the persons, places, and events of his own tale, the epic similes of The Faerie Queene evince an allegorical reception of the past. The extended comparisons of Paradise Lost, on the other hand, consistently deny the similarity between his story and its predecessors, which gesture suggests a different attitude towards the role of description. Milton's originality has been variously dubbed as sublime, imaginative, and transumptive, these labels being, I conclude, varieties of irony.