Studia Litterarum

Abstract

Contemporary notion of style as a set of rules that allows the author choose and combine the elements of content and form when producing a literary work (V.V. Vinogradov, Contemporary notion of style as a set of rules that allows the author choose and combine the elements of content and form when producing a literary work (V.V. Vinogradov, A.N. Sokolov et al.) was in many respects prefigured in “The Arte of English Poesie” (1589) attributed to G. Puttenham, and most of the principles stated in it were mirrored in Edmund’s Spenser’s Epithalamion (1595). The style of the poem is remarkable for its combination of heterogeneous elements borrowed from both the earlier epithalamic tradition and the toolbox of such arts as music, painting, and architecture. A number of papers published in recent decades have revealed the picturesqueness and musicality of the poem seeing Epithalamion as a work bearing typical characteristics of the poet’s idiostyle. This paper suggests that there is a possibility to single it out from the rest of Spenser’s work and read it as a poem which peculiar style that results from the interplay of the emergent grand styles of the time such as Mannerism and/or Baroque, on the one hand, and the elements anticipating Neo-Classicism, on the other. The elaborate Mannerist/ Baroque structure of Epithalamion is permeated with the number symbolism supporting the idea of the perfect harmony of the wedlock blessed by Holy Church in the bridal poem, while its Neo-Classical elements reveal Spenser as a successor of Sappho and Catullus. In the concluding part of the essay, we attempt to evaluate how these peculiarities of the Epithalamion style were rendered in Russian and Chinese translations of the poem.

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