Edmund Spenser and the spatiality of allegory

This thesis considers the relationship between space and allegory in the poetry of Edmund Spenser. It argues that Spenserian allegory is an inherently spatial conceit. In The Faerie Queene, the figurative nature of metaphors seems to be deliberately forgotten, as spatial metaphors take on literal existence. Fairyland reifies ethical concepts, and these reifications tend to possess spatial characteristics ‘other to’ the ‘spatial consequences’ of those concepts outside the allegory. I adopt from Christopher Burlinson’s instructive earlier study (2006) a Lefebvrian critique of the idea that space signifies like a text. This anticipates the second major claim of the thesis: that taking action in Fairyland is not analogous to reading The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s figures are only similar to the poem’s readers, rather than simple transpositions of them. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first is about the spatiality of persons. Surveying classical and Renaissance theories of prosopopoeia and contemporary theories of personification, I argue that personification should be considered as a kind of allegory, because of the ‘spatial otherness’ it entails. In the second part, I examine embodiments of nature, focusing on Spenser’s neglected figure of Night, and his famous personification of the world’s rivers. I argue that personification exchanges natural motion for human mobility, thus compounding the illegibility of the natural world. The final two chapters examine two locations, caves and houses, by which concepts in Fairyland are reified. I show the spatial distortions effected on ethical concepts by these locations, their characteristics and cultural connotations. The thesis provides extended readings of episodes and motifs in The Faerie Queene which have received very little critical attention. It re-assesses the relationship between reading the poem and action in Fairyland. Its account of allegory as a spatial conceit also adjusts a tendency to pose allegory and space in antithesis