[DOWNLOAD] "Samuel Sheppard's Faerie King and the Fragmentation of Royalist Epic (Critical Essay)" by 1500-1900 Studies in English Literature # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Samuel Sheppard's Faerie King and the Fragmentation of Royalist Epic (Critical Essay)
- Author : 1500-1900 Studies in English Literature
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 100 KB
Description
In 1648, imprisoned for publishing Royalist propaganda, the journalist Samuel Sheppard began The Faerie King, a poem "Fashioning Love & Honour In an Heroicall Heliconian Dresse." (1) Unfinished, virtually unknown, and in several places almost unintelligible, The Faerie King offers a complex perspective on the challenges faced by Sheppard's contemporaries who rendered the Civil War into poetry. A combination of vulgar newsbook rhetoric and elevated style, Royalist desire for restoration and political disillusionment, the poem was never published in Sheppard's lifetime and has largely escaped the attention of scholars working on the literature of the mid-seventeenth century. (2) The Faerie King is a work of rich paradox, narrative inconsistency, and at times extraordinary imagistic power. Although the postscript suggests its imminent publication, the poem does not appear to be at all complete, and The Faerie King joins Sir William Davenant's Gondibert and Abraham Cowley's Civil War and Davideis in the virtual subgenre of the unfinished Royalist Civil War epic. Sheppard's poem testifies to both the challenges and the possibilities inherent in writing epic poetry from a position of defeat and disillusionment. In his representation of political and literary fragmentation, Sheppard demonstrates the unsettling impact of the actual experience of war on literary form. Sheppard is best known for his prolific work in pamphlet journalism of the 1640s and early 1650s, part of the outburst of publishing that accompanied the Revolution. Initially a supporter of Parliament, he soon changed sides and by 1647 became a strident Royalist propagandist. Sheppard was jailed several times between 1647 and 1650 and asserts in the postscript to The Faerie King that he composed the poem, book by book, mainly in the different prisons where he was detained (p. 334). The poem itself narrates the fortunes of the kingdom of Ruina, ruled by the hapless King Ariodant and his successors, in an allegorical form that mixes epic and romance narrative structures. Sheppard apparently intended The Faerie King to be his masterpiece, a literary memorial that would preserve his authorial name for posterity; but, it is unclear whether Sheppard intended the poem to be published as it is, died before he could make final revisions, gave up before fully completing it, or simply decided not to publish. Although a finished postscript is attached to the poem, the poem itself appears to be unfinished, offering no narrative resolution to a final canto that contains a considerably smaller number of stanzas than the other cantos (twelve compared with an average of thirty).