What is modernity? Where are modernitys points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Allegory and Enchantment explores these broad questions by considering the work of English writers at the threshold of modernity, and by considering,in particular, the cultural forms these writers want to leave behind. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, many English writers fashion themselves as engaged in breaking away from an array of old idols: magic, superstition, tradition, the sacramental, the medieval. Many of these writers persistently use metaphors of disenchantment, of awakening from a broken spell, to describe their self-consciously modern orientation toward a medieval past. And many of them associate that repudiated past with the dynamics and conventions of allegory. In the hands of the major English practitioners of allegorical narrativeWilliam Langland, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyanallegory shows signs of strain and disintegration. The work of these writers seems to suggest a story of modern emergence in which medieval allegory, with its search for divine order in the material world, breaks down under the pressure of modern disenchantment. But these four early modern writers also make possible other understandings of modernity. Each of them turns to allegory as a central organizing principle for his most ambitious poetic projects. Each discovers in the ancient forms of allegory a vital, powerful instrument of disenchantment. Each of them, therefore, opens up surprising possibilities: that allegory and modernity are inescapably linked; that the story of modern emergence is much older than the early modern period; and that the things modernity has tried to repudiatethe old enchantmentsare not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.

About the Author
Jason Crawford (PhD, Harvard) is Assistant Professor of English at Union University, where he teaches and writes about early modern literature and culture. His essays have appeared in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Religion & Literature, and English Studies.

Reviews
Where Bowge is concerned, Crawford unpacks how the narrator Drede's disenchantment with the court springs from the poem's 'allegorical idiom' being 'an articulation of solitude' and alienation from the presiding power structures. * Edward Smith, The English Association *
While the scope and subject of this book defy any reductive paraphrase, it focuses on allegory as a paradoxical and dialectical mode which simultaneously invites the enchanted and disenchanted. * Joel Grossman, The English Association *
This is an intensely-researched, far-reaching, and sometimes demanding book ... and will, I think, reward further readings and consideration in the future ... An impressively compressed and capacious intervention in a complex field. * Raphael Lyne, The Seventeenth Century *
the book is invaluable for early modern researchers and academics interested in religion, allegory, literary constructions of enchantment and, more prominently, disenchantment. * Frank Swannack, University of Salford, Parergon *
Crawford's insightful readings of a wide range of literary and philosophical texts will be attractive to a large spectrum of readers, and each chapter offers fresh and compelling interpretations of its central sources. As such, the book promises to be one with which future scholarship on allegory must reckon and contend. * Julianne Sandberg, Renaissance Quarterly *
A wide-ranging book. * Ayesha Ramachandran (Yale University), The Spenser Review *
A robust and penetrating account of the vexed history of allegory from antiquity through touchstone allegorical texts in early modernity. * Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900 *
Crawford's readings are generally illuminating ... Jason Crawford's Allegory and Enchantment is an intelligent and ambitious work that confirms its author's knowledge of the relevant texts and scholarship. * Richard C. McCoy, Modern Philology *
This challenging study will leave readers thinking long and hard about the tension between truth-telling and story-telling and how we define our relation to the past. * John Farrell, Los Angeles Review of Books *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198788041
Author Jason Crawford
Format Hardback
Page Count 238
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Dimensions(mm) 223mm * 147mm * 19mm