The Poetics of Re-Enchantment: Penelope Fitzgerald’s <i>The Beginning of Spring</i>

The essay offers a reading of Penelope Fitzgerald’s Beginning Spring (1988) and relates it to the cultural conception Modernity as an age “disenchantment,” potential contribution “subtler language” literature (to borrow Charles Taylor’s phrase) “re-enchantment” world. Following brief theoretical introduction concept Disenchantment, framed by Lukács, Weber, Taylor and, more obliquely, Roland Barthes, close Spring. This novel, I suggest, encapsulates tension between “hermeneutics suspicion” restoration,” initially coined Ricoeur recently developed in work Eve Sedgwick Rita Felski, orchestrates experience through its intertextual relations with Tolstoy, subtle strategic navigation narrative register ridiculous that Sublime, consequent shift from mode disenchantment poetics re-enchantment. closure novel may thus be read spirit “restoration,” no means simplistic or naïve, but clearly oriented direction Sacred.