This website is the first iteration of a project exploring early modern epic writing from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this first incarnation, the project focuses on commonplaces, scrutinizing Spenser and Milton’s engagement with these as a way of understanding how they are structuring their epics, and in turn, how these are crucial components defining what it meant to write epic in English. The site will house a digital commonplace book documenting Spenser and Milton’s use of recurring literary touchstones including images, rhetorical and logical structures, and lexis, and visualizations of these commonplaces, the first of which are being forged by Dr. Emma Annette Wilson and her graduate class, EN668, at the University of Alabama in Fall 2015.
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