Gloriana (novel)
Dust-jacket from the first edition
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| Author | Michael Moorcock |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Jill Riches |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fantasy novel |
| Publisher | Allison & Busby |
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Publication date
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1978 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 348 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 4332081 |
| 823/.9/14 | |
| LC Class | PZ4.M8185 Gl 1978 PR6063.O59 |
Gloriana, or The Unfulfill'd Queen is an award-winning work of literary fantasy by British novelist Michael Moorcock. It was first published in 1978 (London: Allison & Busby) and has remained in print ever since.
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 "Fairyland." 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.
Moorcock reimagines the realm of Queen Elizabeth I and her Early Modern England as that of Queen Gloriana I of Albion, ruler of an empire stretching from "Hindustan" and "Cathay" to the "great continent of Virginia (and Kansas)." The era is a century after the time of Elizabeth I: "I wrote the book as if it was being written in the late 17th century, closer to Defoe than Shakespeare, drawing on language and understanding from that far forward, as it were," says Moorcock.Yuletide and Twelfth Night are celebrated within a pagan spirituality and pantheon that includes Mithras, Thor, and Zeus. Albion's capital is "Troynovante" (New Troy), which is an allusion to sixteenth century mythologies about the alleged initial settlement of England by descendants of the sacked classical kingdom of Troy.
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