Moving Beyond (Topoi E-I)

Moving Beyond explored the aesthetics underlying Spenser’s Faerie Queene as well as other texts, from the Renaissance to contemporary literature. It focused on the transformations ancient discourses and modes of thinking about transcendence and the Other World undergo in their later contexts. Enquiring into, and seeking to describe the devices used in these Early Modern and Modern renderings of ancient topologies, the project aimed at showing the extent to which literary fictions not only document and mirror (“represent’) earlier discourses on space, turning them into formative agencies, but in fact actively reflect, reshape and rework them in a manner that may help to discover and thematize aspects hitherto unperceived.