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Chapter 1 - Visionary, Interrupted

Spenser’s Skeptical Artwork

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2021

Anita Gilman Sherman
Affiliation:
American University, Washington DC
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Summary

Spenser’s poetry offers a glimpse into the aesthetics of skepticism. To understand Spenser’s exploration of perception, interpretation, and subjective experience, the chapter considers skeptical questions posed by medieval philosophy regarding universals, abstraction, mental language, the status of pictures in the mind, and the extent of God’s power. According to Heiko Oberman’s view of the via moderna, these nominalist investigations with their counterfactual approach lead to feelings of contingency and autonomy that in turn produce the subversive political idea that things can be otherwise. In his translations of du Bellay and Marot in his Complaints and in “November,” as well as on Mount Acidale in The Fairy Queen and in The Mutability Cantos, Spenser creates rapturous visions that soon dissolve. These intimations of the sublime have a skeptical quality that suggest a grounding in nominalism. Because Heidegger combats a skeptical metaphysics premised on the rift between subject and object, this chapter uses aspects of his philosophical lexicon to illuminate the stakes of Spenser’s poetic travail with problems of truth, concealment, disclosure, and fullness of being.

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Chapter
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Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature
The Problems and Pleasures of Doubt
, pp. 32 - 73
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • Visionary, Interrupted
  • Anita Gilman Sherman, American University, Washington DC
  • Book: Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature
  • Online publication: 16 April 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108903813.002
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  • Visionary, Interrupted
  • Anita Gilman Sherman, American University, Washington DC
  • Book: Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature
  • Online publication: 16 April 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108903813.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Visionary, Interrupted
  • Anita Gilman Sherman, American University, Washington DC
  • Book: Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature
  • Online publication: 16 April 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108903813.002
Available formats
×