The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic

Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

by Linda Gregerson

Reformation iconoclasts viewed verbal images with the same distrust and aversion as visual images, because they too were capable of shaping and thus waylaying the human imagination; and yet the Reformation also produced the defining monuments of English epic. In an extended analysis, both lucid and theoretically sophisticated, Linda Gregerson traces the contradictory cultural roots of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, illuminating the ideological, political, and gender conflicts that Spenser and Milton confronted as they transformed the epic poem into an instrument for the reformation of the political subject.

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Linda Gregerson is an American poet and member of faculty at the University of Michigan. She recieved her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. In 2014, she was named as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Linda Gregerson is the author of several collections of poetry and literary criticism. Also a Renaissance scholar, a classically trained actor, and a devotee of the sciences, she produces lyrical poems informed by her expansive reading that are inquisitive, unflinching, and tender.

Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Waterborne
Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist for The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep
2000 Guggenheim Fellowship
National Book Award finalist for Manetic North