The Lives of Astyanax: Romance and Recovery in Ariosto, Spenser, and Milto

In this dissertation I argue that Ariosto, Spenser and Milton use the twin strands of romance and epic to reflect on literary continuity from the classical past to early modern Europe. Orlando Furioso, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost tell, in a romance pattern and mode, stories of wounding, survival, and fertility. The romance pattern of the wounded and fertile survivor suggests an alternative to the metaphor of rebirth that is taken to apply to the literature as well as to the visual arts in the early modern period. Like the literary tradition itself, the generic mode of romance recovers, transitively and intransitively.;In Chapter One I read the episode in Iliad 20 in which Poseidon intervenes in the battle between Achilles and Aeneas, a moment recalled in Aeneid 5. As the greatest warrior of classical antiquity, Achilles comes to represent the genre of epic, while Aeneas is seen as a figure for the genre of romance, in that he is a favorite son who will survive to reproduce. Ancient epic juxtaposes these two characters and asks whose strength is greater; early modern poets answer the question in the stories they tell and retell about the fertile survivor.;In Chapter Two I consider the character of Medoro in Orlando Furioso as a type for the romance survivor. Medoro is a youthful foot soldier of obscure lineage who survives and recovers through the help of a caretaker, Angelica, whom he then marries. Medoro establishes a type in the Furioso: the youthful and sexually vigorous survivor who founds or continues an illegitimate lineage. Guidon Selvaggio, Falanto, and Elbanio are examples of this type: their youth and fertility suggest the hybrid vigor of the genre of romance, which Ariosto juxtaposes with characters who represent the outmoded genre of epic in their failure to reproduce, like Orlando and Rodomonte. The intertwining of romance modes and characters with epic modes in the Furioso suggests an acceptance or recognition of illegitimacy in terms of human history, political power, and the literary tradition.;In Chapter Three I argue that in Book III of the Faerie Queene , Spenser's Adonis is a type, like Medoro in the Furioso : both recall a famous character from classical antiquity who dies in the literary tradition, and their survival suggests a metaphor for the relationship between early modern culture and classical antiquity. The character Timias in the Faerie Queene is explicitly modeled on Medoro: both are wounded and survive through the caretaking of a princess. Spenser insists on and develops the role of the female caretaker in each of his character's recoveries, and I read these caretakers not only as so many reflections of the female monarch, but also as figures for the humanist or philologist who restores damaged or wounded texts back to their former, healthy state.;In Chapter Four I read Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost as romance characters: they are youthful favorites in a romance garden; they cause and suffer from a wound by disobeying God; they recover thanks to the caretaking of God's personified grace; and they survive to reproduce. Adam and Eve are romance characters in the vein of Medoro, Adonis, and Timias: they undergo a process of fall, caretaking, and recovery before they can become fertile. Romance has its own trajectory and ends, and although it works against closure in given narratives, romance has a discernible narrative structure: it counters epic teleology with the promise of resistance, restoration, and survival.;The Epilogue offers a brief sketch of narrative structures and possibilities, from the threshold of writing to contemporary fiction. Between the two extremes of narrative structure, epic teleology and death on one hand and romance expansiveness and vitality on the other, Ariosto, Spenser and Milton offer the pattern of wounding, recovery and fertility as a metaphor for the period's self-identification, and as an alternative to the narrative extremes of epic and romance. One might argue that literature sees itself as the survivor of the wound of Time. Literature does not die and see itself as reborn; it recovers to reproduce.