Archie Cornish

The University of Sheffield, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Faculty Member

Middlebury College, English Literature, Faculty Member

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Specialist in Renaissance literature with interests in representations of landscape and architecture, Spenser, allegory, nationhood, Thomas Nashe, rhythm and rhetoric. Recent Research Associate at Sheffield, PhD from Oxford.

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Ingo Berensmeyer

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Darragh Greene

University College Dublin

Katherine Eggert

University of Colorado, Boulder

James Nohrnberg

Elena Haltrin-Khalturina (Халтрин-Халтурина)

Institute of World Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow

Melissa J. Rack

University of South Carolina

Amanda Lehr

Vanderbilt University

Melissa E Sanchez (she/her)

University of Pennsylvania

Harry - Berger Jr

University of California, Santa Cruz

Jennifer Vaught

University of Louisiana at Lafayette

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Papers by Archie Cornish

Space and Spenserian Allegory: Some Proposals

Considering questions of space, theorists of Spenserian allegory have a tendency to juxtapose the... more Considering questions of space, theorists of Spenserian allegory have a tendency to juxtapose the allegorical with the spatial. That tendency generates what we might call the orthodox view, which goes something like this: allegory is the invasion of material spaces by ideas, a violent yoking that produces an allegorical reification. Those material spaces might be landscapes, buildings or even-in some accounts-bodies. They might resist or evade their hostile takeover by ideas, generating strange discrepancies, yet even in that resistance a basic opposition endures between the idea and the space it invades. We could trace the orthodox view to Coleridge's denigration of allegory as a bifurcated mode, and to Benjamin's brilliant argument that allegory anticipates the age of the commodity, thrusting before us piles of material which it tries desperately to invest with significance. No one who studies Spenser's allegory can do without Angus Fletcher's Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964), and still less Gordon Teskey's Allegory and Violence (1996). Fletcher famously compares the allegorical hero with one 'thought… to be possessed by a demon'. Teskey's notion of 'capture', the antecedent and inner lining of personification, similarly depicts the material body-Francesca da Rimini in the Inferno, for exampleinvaded by the concept it is to represent. Teskey does not, like Coleridge, reduce allegory to the realm of abstract fancy. Yet a related critique, articulated by Judith Anderson's review, contends that by allegory Teskey often seems to mean 'idealism'. Teskey and Fletcher's ideas continue to underscore contemporary thinking on Spenserian allegory, in all its rich diversity. We define allegory at our peril, but we can observe in Renaissance rhetorical theory some patterns in how Spenser's literary culture thought of it. Allegory belongs to the realm of metaphor; it's characterised by Cicero and Quintilian as a continual metaphor or body of related metaphors. It is a form of otherspeaking, of using a metaphor to say one thing and, with the reader's help, mean something else. It's also a mode which turns abstract or absent ideas into reifications. 1 These two processes, of other-speaking and reification, are related; in some cases they are two sides of one coin. The orthodox view also exerts its influence on Christopher Burlinson's pioneering consideration, published sixteen years ago, of the relationship between Spenserian allegory, space and material. Burlinson, who orientates himself theoretically by Henri Lefebvre's Marxist analysis of The Production of Space, detects in The Faerie Queene a double movement: spaces are captured by the ideas Spenser needs them to signify, causing their material to pile up redundantly; these invaded spaces push to the margin of the poem and the reader's attention the spaces of real, social life, disguising their socially produced nature. The witch's hut in Book III, like the House of Care in Book IV, is a brief sojourn in the Book's narrative, held apart from its supposed 'allegorical centre'. It's made to stand for, or invaded by, the concept of idleness in a way that conceals the social origins

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Likeness as Trigger: Epic and Traumatic Simile in Robin Robertson's The Long Take

Introduction: Similes 'When you're done, if you're extraordinarily lucky', writes Stephanie Burt ... more Introduction: Similes 'When you're done, if you're extraordinarily lucky', writes Stephanie Burt of the poetic process, 'you will have something new in language, something of which we might say "there's nothing like that". And yet it is like something; it is like something that happened, or could happen, to you'. 2 Burt's recent essay argues, as many have before it, that likening things to other things, making connections, is poetry's distinguishing core property. The most explicit kind of likening available to the poet is the trope called simile. Similes connect two images, or passages, or ideas, with an explicit marker, like 'like'; they can be distinguished from literal comparisons, though, in that they are figurative, which is to say that the relation between their elements is not obvious or inevitable; or they express the connection in non-literal terms. 'Max is tall, like Mortimer' is a literal comparison; 'Max is as tall as an oak' is a simile. 3 At the heart of simile is transgression, the going across from one thing to another which is often also a crossing of domains. Yet some similes are transgressive in more than just the broad, etymologically original sense of that word. Of Eliot's 'evening.. spread out against the sky / like a patient etherised upon a table', Burt notes the twentieth century American poet John Berryman's belief that it was where 'modern poetry begins'. 4 If similes transgress, it's often because their tenor and vehicle (or in the language of technical poetics, target and base) are drawn, as in Eliot's lines, from such different domains. Shelley's similes, which like Dante's often compare a thing simply to a generalised version of itself, enact the difficulty of likening a thing apprehended by the inspired imagination to anything else in the universe. They shock us by revealing their inadequacy. One of the strangest and most transgressive kinds of simile is the oldest literary kind, the epic or 'Homeric' simile. In the Iliad, an image from the main narrative, which inevitably describes the violence of war, is compared to an equivalent in a different domain. Warriors fight to recover the body of a dead hero, for example, the way flies swarm around milk-buckets in the springtime. The domain of the epic similes isn't pastoral, in the sense of a world of peaceful indolence; it's a rural world where all events, even violent or terrifying ones, are part of natural cycles. Sometimes the comparing movement from one-off Troy to the stable rural state is particularly shocking. When Menelaos is struck in the face by an arrow, his bleeding wound is compared to the scarlet dye a woman uses to make a cheek-piece for a horse. As Susanne Wofford puts it, the simile re-describes the wound as 'an aesthetic object', and thus 'transforms' it. 5 Wofford's 1 This essay is dedicated to my grandfather, Donald Cameron, who landed on Juno Beach in 1944 with the Royal Navy.

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‘Mythologized, demythologized’: dwelling, building and writing in the early poetry of Seamus Heaney.

Oxford Research in English, 2018

Examining images of craft in the early poetry of Seamus Heaney, I argue against a Heideggerian in... more Examining images of craft in the early poetry of Seamus Heaney, I argue against a Heideggerian interpretation of his depicted craftsmen. Though the earth, in its dark ancientness, is presented in mystical terms, the activities of building, repairing and farming are remarkably secular and artistic - such as the work of the thatcher in his eponymous poem, 'couchant' on the rafters having spent the morning 'warming up'. Based on this analysis I argue that Heaney exhibits in his early work an 'artisan poetics', with this modern craft serving as an available model for poetic creation; he also thinks through the differences between his literary crafts and the ones he depicts.

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Jennifer C. Vaught, Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser

The Spenser Review, 2020

‘His Midas Touch’: Building and Writing in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser and Seamus Heaney

‘“His Midas Touch”: building and writing in the poetry of Edmund Spenser and Seamus Heaney’.

Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Literature and Art from Classical to Contemporary, ed. by Jane Griffiths and Adam Hanna (Palgrave, 2020)., 2020

This chapter examines how two very different relationships with dwellings are reflected in the wo... more This chapter examines how two very different relationships with dwellings are reflected in the work of the early modern English poet Edmund Spenser and the modern Irish poet Seamus Heaney: two writers widely separated in time but geographically linked by Ireland. It argues that, for Spenser, building is antecedent to writing: in consequence of his dubious title to Kilcolman Castle and its estate, the provisionality of the former enables the deliberation of the latter. In Heaney’s work, however, building is not antecedent to the writing of verse, but its equivalent: for Heaney, poetry ought not to outstrip the bricolage of building, but take it as its model. The chapter shows that the methods and circumstances by which built spaces were created from the imaginings of their inhabitants, changing the texture of writing itself.

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Drafts by Archie Cornish

Spenser in Doggerland

Ben Smith’s Doggerland (2019), an ecological dystopia set on a gigantic North Sea wind farm, seem... more Ben Smith’s Doggerland (2019), an ecological dystopia set on a gigantic North Sea wind farm, seems at first sight the dark reverse of The Faerie Queene. Where Spenser’s writing advocates a vision of an ascendant English nation, taming and cultivating both nature and its own moral character, Smith’s ‘planted’ wind farm reveals the destructiveness of such a vision. Yet, as I’ll argue in this paper, The Faerie Queene is an illuminating prism through which to understand Doggerland. Both works present worlds – Fairyland, and the submerged land bridge to the European continent – which are at once historical adjuncts to this one, and allegorical images of it. Allegory (from both early modern and ecocritical perspectives) helps us understand the mass of vividly described detritus floating through the wind farm; Spenser’s bodily metaphors, his abiding interest in parts and wholes, provokes a startling comparison between the House of Temperance and a wind turbine.

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Spenser's Gnats: Epic Simile, Allegory, and the Incongruity of Recurrence

This essay considers the presence of the insect in the extended similes of Renaissance epics, in ... more This essay considers the presence of the insect in the extended similes of Renaissance epics, in relation to debates on incongruity and decorum in the Renaissance reception of Homer. I argue that epic simile within an allegorical text like Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' functions as a transparent demonstration of how allegorical interpretation might work. I suggest that Spenser's metaphors present one-off actions which ask to be construed as recurrent processes. I also trace the transformation of the epic simile from Spenser to Milton’s own epics, by way of thinking about the significance of attention and distraction in early modern culture.

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Space and Spenserian Allegory: Some Proposals

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Likeness as Trigger: Epic and Traumatic Simile in Robin Robertson's The Long Take

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‘Mythologized, demythologized’: dwelling, building and writing in the early poetry of Seamus Heaney.

Oxford Research in English, 2018

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Jennifer C. Vaught, Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser

The Spenser Review, 2020

‘His Midas Touch’: Building and Writing in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser and Seamus Heaney

‘“His Midas Touch”: building and writing in the poetry of Edmund Spenser and Seamus Heaney’.

Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Literature and Art from Classical to Contemporary, ed. by Jane Griffiths and Adam Hanna (Palgrave, 2020)., 2020

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Spenser in Doggerland

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Spenser's Gnats: Epic Simile, Allegory, and the Incongruity of Recurrence

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Archie Cornish

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