Allegory and the Art of Memory in Book 2 of Spenser's Faerie Queene

Abstract

The problem of "imposed allegory," as Rosamond Tuve once called it, remains an unresolved challenge for theorists of allegory: the project of aligning literal and metaphorical levels of allegorical meaning places readers in the position of having to know the text's meaning before having "unveiled" it. This essay argues that the paradox of temporal anteriority is no paradox: early modern poets understood the discovery of allegorical meaning to be a process of rediscovery–i.e. of recollection. By returning to a memory-based understanding of allegorical hermeneutics, this essay recovers a forgotten aesthetic tradition, one organized around premodern theories of the memory-image.

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