Genre
On the novel's title page and on its original cover, Moorcock calls Gloriana a romance and, indeed, its setting and characters resemble those of that popular literary genre of the Medieval and Renaissance periods—an imagined time of quests, jousts, and masques. Moorcock based his novel on elements of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, an allegorical epic poem of the 1590s that praises Queen Elizabeth I in the character of Gloriana, queen of a mythical "Faerieland." But Gloriana is an anti-romance, "more a dialogue with Spenser of The Faerie Queene than a description of my own ideal State," says Moorcock.
Read more about this topic: Gloriana (novel)
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