Allegory and enchantment an early modern poetics Crawford, Jason creator author. text bibliography Criticism, interpretation, etc. enk 2017 2017 First edition. monographic eng print viii, 227 pages ; 23 cm Allegory and Enchantment" is about the genealogies of modernity, and about the lingering power of some of the cultural forms against which modernity defines itself: religion, magic, the sacramental, the medieval. Jason Crawford explores the emergence of modernity by investigating the early modern poetics of allegorical narrative, a literary form that many modern writers have taken to be paradigmatically medieval. In four of the most substantial allegorical narratives produced in early modern England-William Langland's Piers Plowman, John Skelton's The Bowge of Courte, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress-allegory is intimately linked with a self-conscious modernity, and with what many commentators have, in the last century, called 'the disenchantment of the world.' The makers of these early modern narratives themselves take a keen interest in metaphors and postures of disenchantment. They fashion themselves as skeptics, spell-breakers, prophets against false institutions and false belief. And they often regard their own allegorical forms as another dangerous enchantment, a residue of the medieval past they have set out to renounce. Jason Crawford. Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-219) and index. English literature Early modern, 1500-1700 History and criticism Allegory Allegory English literature Early modern 1500-1700 fast PR421 .C72 2017 820.9/003 9780198788041 0198788045 2016942385 ERASA 160804 20170407131744.0 in00003837981 eng