The Saga of the Faerie Queene - The use of Epic Conventions in Edmund Spenser's Allegorical Tale

Through this paper I will try to explain in what ways Edmund Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queene can be defined as an epic. In The Faerie Queene this is no different: by wielding the typical characteristics of the genre of the epic Spenser works in the tradition of both classical and medieval epic writers such as respectively Homer and Virgil, and Ariosto and Tasso. There are two kinds of epic conventions: the textual-related and the content-related (and some conventions that overlap these two distinct domains of text and content). By using this division, I will deal with the textualrelated first and subsequently with the context-related conventions, describing the general concepts of the characteristic and at the same time indicating where and how Spenser applies and integrates it in his magnificent epic poem, for epic it is and there will be no doubt about that at the end of this paper