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 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. M...
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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 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 "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.
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...
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