Didactic pathos and the epic hero in Spenser and Milton

This dissertation, "Didactic Pathos and the Epic Hero in Spenser and Milton," explores the strategies poets and critics have used to justify poetic pathos and enargeia from the point of view of moral instruction. Renaissance critics emphasize epic poetry's didactic potential as a way of asserting its moral value; but they also celebrate the epic poet's pyrotechnical mimesis as an aesthetic construction that may take precedence over didactic goals. Despite its effort to make poetic pathos and didacticism coincide, Renaissance critics, like Renaissance poets, cannot conceal a strong attraction to pathos as an end in itself. After treating this issue in the critical works of Scaliger, Tasso and Sidney, the study continues with a consideration of similar dynamics in the major poems of Spenser and Milton. Both poets draw on the paradigms of Protestant religious narrative to allow pathos a central role in the formation of the heroic personality--a role this study attributes to what is here called the Pauline-Augustinian aspect of Spenser and Milton. Yet both poets also resist pathos for reasons connected to Protestant narrative: their attachment to the Christian-Stoic mode prominent in Protestantism. After analyzing the ultimate subtext for Stoic arguments against pathos, including poetic pathos--Bks. 2 and 3 of Plato's Republic--the dissertation concludes with an examination of Dryden's critical responses to Spenser and Milton, which represent a shift away from the Protestant defenses of pathos in the two earlier poets and toward an aestheticizing critical mode that is still current.