Spenser’s Parenthetical Butterflies

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2024

Abstract

Centring on Spenser’s literary treatment of the butterfly in ‘Muiopotmos’ (1591), this chapter considers the valences of the parenthetical in order to posit a lepidopteran practice of reading parenthetically. The chapter begins by offering some historical context for Spenser’s and contemporaries’ representations of butterflies, in materials including Renaissance natural philosophy and imaginative literature of the sixteenth century, before turning to the parenthetical. A means of preserving that which is remarkable while simultaneously flagging its inconsequence, the parenthetical offers a kind of thematic hospitality, a willingness to shelter in a text that which could be, but is not, discarded. This model of parenthetical hospitality opens new interpretive possibilities when applied to ‘Muiopotmos’, itself a seeming burlesque of hospitality. A poem throughout which parenthetical remarks appear, and in which these parentheses are in fact integral to the meter, rhyme, and narrative content, ‘Muiopotmos’ foregrounds the parenthetical in ways that model a reading practice grounded in literary ecology.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

First Page

159

Last Page

179

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