The Donna Angelica and the British Enlightenment Poets: Six Studies from Butler to Crabbe (21st Century Perspectives on British Literature and Society)

The aim of the book is to propose new interpretations of poets who are among the most valued and discussed in the British Enlightenment.In fulfilling its aim, the book covers English poetry-and intellectual history-from the Restoration to the later eighteenth century.It examines how the myth of the donna angelica (the angelic lady), ancient in origin but given its best-known form within the medieval literature of fin’amor, lives on beyond the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the Enlightenment.To be more precise, it studies how some major Augustan poets appropriate and recreate what, for convenience, can be called the donna angelica topos (or, the angelic lady motif).They do so for a great many reasons linked with quite diverse circumstances.Nevertheless, the myth’s intellectual richness, emotional intensity, and inherent ambiguities mean that it offers each of them a powerful way for articulating, interpreting, exploring refractions of eros-whether singly or diversely directed, con