Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision.

Publication: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Publication Date: 01-APR-93

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COPYRIGHT 1993 University of Illinois Press

By Theresa M. Krier. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Pp. I + 257. $31-50.

In undertaking a book-length study of Spenser's treatment of (predominantly) erotic visions in The Faerie Queene, Theresa M. Krier radically narrows what might easily have been an impossibly broad field of investigation, by considering the influence of only two predecessors, Virgil and Ovid. More particularly still, she gives greatest prominence to individual, paradigmatic moments in each of these writers: to the scene in Book I of the Aeneid in which the disguised Venus appears to her son as a nymph of Diana, and to Ovid's story of Diana and Actaeon. These...

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