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

experience and establish an affective foreground that anticipates similar,
future narrative events and that affective appraisals in fiction occur
“well in advance of our ability to appraise a situation cognitively.” 23
Moreover, he suggests both that the “unfolding” of a narrative can be
24
“shaped by its activation of a prior narrative latent in memory” and
that readers’ personal and shared autobiographical responses become
generative of multiple affordances that thrive in the ambiguity and in-
determinacy of literary texts. Emotions generated by a text, therefore,
help to organize it in relation to one’s own reading experience and fa-
cilitate interaction with the experiences of other readers. 25

Intratextal Memory in The Faerie Queene

Spenser’s long romance offers many instances of intratextual memories
evoked in response to simple verbal cues: repeated words, synonyms,
or phrases. In the Faerie Queene, repetitions of the words “wand,”
“rod,” and “scepter,” are, for instance, associated with recurring
schemata that are connected with specific character types:

23 Miall, “Emotions and the Structuring of Narrative Responses,” 339, 336-
337, and Caracciolo, Experientiality, 49-50. See Martin Löschnigg, “Postclas-
sical Narratology and the Theory of Autobiography,” in Postclassical Narra-
tology: Approaches and Analyses, edited by J. Alber and Monika Fludernik
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 255-74: “In order to cope with
present experience, memory references a considerable number of experien-
tial repertories. It engenders dynamic ‘scripts’ as well as static ‘schemata,’
to use well-known terms from cognitive psychology. Narrative shows a par-
ticular affinity to these processes, since its specific temporal structure is ide-
ally suited to conveying the interaction of past and present consciousness
[…] The rendering of past events includes a consciousness, in the present,
of their eventual outcome,” so that, using the language of David Herman,
“[t]elling narratives is a certain way of reconciling emergent with prior
knowledge” (264).
24 Miall, “Emotions and the Structuring of Narrative Responses,” 339.
25 Ibid., 334. See also Marco Sperduti et al., “The Paradox of Fiction: Emotion-
al Response toward Fiction and the Modulatory Role of Self-relevance,” Acta
psychologica 165 (2016), 53-59.

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