ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Sung-kyun YimThis study is to examine and re-evaluate the pastoral tradition manifested in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book One, so as to understand the nature of the poet's Christian humanism and its relationship to pastoralism. Pastoral, as a literary genre, often deals with shepherds' love affairs within the idealistic rural environments. The tradition is known to have started with Theocritus's Idylls, followed by Virgil's Ecologues, and after having had disappeared during the Medieval periods, resurfaced with Petrach's Ecologues as an influential literary genre to the early modern poets and courtiers. Strictly speaking, classical nature does not go well along with Christian world view. The idealistic rural world portrayed by classical pastoralists, however, is reviewed by Renaissance humanists and presented as a type of the paradise, now lost through human corruptions. The classical nature has transformed itself into the moral nature. Thus, nature in Renaissance literature is almost always related to the way that human beings achieve paradise within themselves, the salvation.Book One of The Faerie Queene shows that Spenser's portrayal of nature, or his pastoralism, is different from the nostalgia for the golden age and from the desire to restore the paradise. It is God's creation and given to haman beings as a present; nevertheless, it rarely protects, cures, and then returns human beings back to their civilizations. Rather, pastoral innocence (often synonymous with ignorance) and otium endanger and test the heroes, and therefore it becomes what the heroes must overcome. The Redcross knight must finish the race before he indulges in pastoral pleasure. Actually, his early failures to recognize the pastoral danger and his later realization that he must accept God's Grace while working hard constitute the plot and the meaning of the book.

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