Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature

Challenging conventional notions that literary allegorism declined around 1600, Kenneth Borris reassesses the Renaissance relations between allegory and heroic poetry. He concentrates particularly on the major texts of Sidney, Spenser and Milton. Borris offers a fresh approach to the interaction of allegory with literary genres; focusing on epic, he further analyzes the distinctive codes and conventions that constituted the generic repertoire of Renaissance allegorical epic poetry.