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DANIEL T. LOCHMAN, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

Long fictional narratives with complex frames and structures present
a challenge to readers seeking meaningful coherence within them, yet
cognitive and neuroscientific research has begun to offer explanations
about processes readers experience when negotiating such fictional
structures and finding significance within them. Readers, who may be
said to co-construct with authors’ texts the experience of reading, in-
habit a fictional storyworld and revise it according to their own prior
experiences within the texts and their own autobiographical experi-
ences. Moreover, readers derive from texts cognitive experiences
wherein their response to what is read may include enactive sensa-
tions, kinetic responses, and affects as well as thoughts, with their full
responses distributed across the body, not limited to the intellective
theoretical, thematic, and source studies that often are the focus of lit-
erary analysis. Readers’ experiences exist dynamically in time – at mo-
ments within the storyworld, in relation to memories created and re-
tained through a fiction, and in anticipation of future fictional devel-
opments. The interface of the experience of a text – which conveys its
own present, past, and future – with the cultural and historical mo-
ment of the text and with the time and culture of the reader proliferate
experiences that flow from a text to a reader and that may be reinstan-
tiated subsequently as textual memories that, in turn, form schemata
and scripts in networks of experience that run through a text and that
relate to other textual, historical, and cultural networks. Memorial net-
works offer means of establishing coherence in works whose length,
structural complexity, and narrative techniques undermine strategies
deploying a straightforward chronology, single narrative line, and
clear causal relationships between one episode and the next.
Sophisticated narratives seldom move sequentially and causally
from episode to episode, and this is especially so for narratives pro-
duced during the early modern period, and in particular for Edmund
Spenser’s 35,000-line poem, The Faerie Queene. It features structural
complexity set within a seemingly simple frame of successive quests,
each related to a frame narrative sketched in the 1590 edition in a le er
from Spenser to Walter Raleigh. The le er indicates that each quest is
to begin from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, and to be re-
lated to a specific virtue identified with the questing knight. Compli-
cating this structure of serial narratives, apparently to occur in the

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