Nikolaienko S. The Poetics of Edmund Spenser’s Love Poetry: Imagery Dominants and Genre Modifications

The thesis focuses on identifying dominant images and genre modifications in Edmund Spenser’s love verses within the context of English Renaissance poetry. It is the first research in Ukrainian English literary studies to offer detailed exploration of the system of imagery used in Edmund Spenser’s sonnet sequence, as well as to specify the genre nature of his hymns. The author substantiates theoretical and methodological premises for her research, traces the diachronic receptive trajectory of the sonnet sequence Amoretti, and discusses major critical and academic interpretative approaches to Spenser’s lyrical poetry. The survey of a massive body of Spenserian literary criticism accumulated over centuries it possible to conclude that the most productive of these approaches were biographical, romantic expressive, modernist, neo-critical, as well as reader response criticism, New Historicism and feminist approaches. Proceeding from the concept of Love developed in the culture of Elizabethan England, the thesis deals with philosophical and esthetic sources of Edmund Spenser’s love poetry. It, addresses, in particular, the artistic mechanisms for combining Neo-Platonic, Petrarchian, and Christian ideas in his lyrical legacy forming the background for the poet’s original philosophy of Love that strove to harmonize its heavenly and earthly aspects.