What is modernity? Where are modernity's points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Allegory and Enchantment explores these broad questions by considering the work of English writers at the threshold of modernity, and by considering, in particular, the cultural forms these writers want to leave behind. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, many English writers fashion themselves as engaged in breaking away from an array of old idols: magic, superstition, tradition, the sacramental, the medieval. Many of these writers persistently use metaphors of disenchantment, of awakening from a broken spell, to describe their self-consciously modern orientation toward a medieval past. And many of them associate that repudiated past with the dynamics and conventions of allegory.
In the hands of the major English practitioners of allegorical narrative-William Langland, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyan-allegory shows signs of strain and disintegration. The work of these writers seems to suggest a story of modern emergence in which medieval allegory, with its search for divine order in the material world, breaks down under the pressure of modern disenchantment. But these four early modern writers also make possible other understandings of modernity. Each of them turns to allegory as a central organizing principle for his most ambitious poetic projects. Each discovers in the ancient forms of allegory a vital, powerful instrument of disenchantment. Each of them, therefore, opens up surprising possibilities: that allegory and modernity are inescapably linked; that the story of modern emergence is much older than the early modern period; and that the things modernity has tried to repudiate-the old enchantments-are not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.
“To write allegory or to write about allegory is no mean task.... Now, into this dark wood ventures Jason Crawford, a knowing, lucid, unflappable and masterful guide: it is a relief and a pleasure to be in his hands. Allegory and Enchantment is a major new intervention into the theory of allegory that seeks to connect the form to questions about modernity, specifically to the experience of disenchantment which is often identified as its defining characteristic.... Crawford deftly draw together these enormous critical and historiographical terms, bringing them into relation with a sharpness that is impressive and very welcome.”
Ayesha Ramachandran, Yale University, The Spenser Review
“Few scholars have succeeded so nicely in connecting a literary genre with its animating intellectual tensions.... This challenging study will leave readers thinking long and hard about the tension between truth-telling and story-telling and how we define our relation to the past.”
John Farrell, Claremont McKenna College, Los Angeles Review of Books
“This is an intensely-researched, far-reaching, and sometimes demanding book... and will, I think, reward further readings and consideration in the future.... An impressively compressed and capacious intervention in a complex field.”
Raphael Lyne, Cambridge University, The Seventeenth Century