Youth Against Age: Generational Strife in Renaissance Poetry- with special reference to Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender (American University Studies)

By Steven Marx

Genre de vie is the French term for what English speakers call the stages of life. This book concerns itself with the fundamental connection between genres de vie and literary genres, between chronological categories of human existence and traditional kinds of poetic discourse. Its central focus falls upon the debate of youth and age, a verse convention which sets aboy and an old man in a rustic landscape and pits them in generational combat. It argues that this neglected Renaissance commonplace distills the thematic and formal essence of the larger mode of pastoral. While offering a rhetorical, historical and anthropological analysis of the particular sub-genre, the book proposes a new way of reading all pastoral, based on a study of the life cycle.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820401838
• ISBN13: 9780820401836
• Release Date: December 1985
• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.