Spenser's Images of Life


Book Description

This book was compiled by Alastair Fowler from notes left by C. S. Lewis at his death. It is Lewis's longest piece of literary criticism, as distinct from literary history. It approaches The Faerie Queene as a majestic pageant of the universe and nature, celebrating God as 'the glad creator', and argues that conventional views of epic and allegory must be modified if the poem is to be fully enjoyed and understood.




Spenser's Images of Life


Book Description

This 1967 book was compiled by Alastair Fowler from notes left by C. S. Lewis at his death. It is Lewis longest piece of literary criticism, as distinct from literary history. It approaches The Faerie Queene as a majestic pageant of the universe and nature, celebrating God as 'the glad creator', and argues that conventional views of epic and allegory must be modified if the poem is to be fully enjoyed and understood.




The Spenser Encyclopedia


Book Description

'This masterly work ought to be The Elizabethan Encyclopedia, and no less.' - Cahiers Elizabethains Edmund Spenser remains one of Britain's most famous poets. With nearly 700 entries this Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive one-stop reference tool for: * appreciating Spenser's poetry in the context of his age and our own * understanding the language, themes and characters of the poems * easy to find entries arranged by subject.




Edmund Spenser


Book Description

This collection represents some of the best recent critical writing on Edmund Spenser, a major Renaissance English poet. The essays cover the whole of Spensers work, from early literary experiments such as The Shepeardes Calendar, to his unfinished crowning work,The Fairie Queene. The introduction provides an overview of critical responses to Spenser, setting his work and the debates which it has generated in their perspective contexts: new historicist, post-structural, psychoanalytic and feminist. His study also covers the critical responses of leading British, Irish and American scholars.




Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral


Book Description

The Shepheardes Calender (1579) signalled Spenser's desire to assume the role of an English Virgil and at the same time his readiness to leave behind the pastoral world of his apprenticeship and his early persona, Colin Clout. Yet Spenser was twice to return to the pastoral world of Colin Clout, first in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (written 1591, published 1595), and then again in the sixth and last complete book of The Faerie Queene. In Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral, David Shore considers the structure of the moral eclogues of the Calender as it defines the pastoral vision that informs and unifies the entire poem. He then examines the themes of poetic idealism and courtly corruption in Colin Clout and sees in their confrontation Spenser's questioning of the public foundations of the poet's heroic endeavour. Finally, he considers Calidore's pastoral retreat in The Faerie Queene and finds in it support for the argument that Spenser's greatest poem is essentially complete. Pastoral is a highly self-conscious genre, especially in Spenser's explorations of the imaginative world of Colin Clout. By bringing together Spenser's three versions of that world, Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral contributes to a richer appreciation of the pastoral works themselves and to a better understanding of the shape of Spenser's literary career as a whole.




Spenser's Allegory of Love


Book Description

Spenser's Allegory of Love approaches the major characters in Books III, IV, and V of The Faerie Queene as fictional personages who function psychically according to Renaissance sexual psychology and physically according to Renaissance sexual physiology. This approach enables readings of the quests in their own peculiar, allegorical way as imitations of actions. For each of the questers - Britomart, Florimell, Scudamour, and Timias - union with a loved one is the goal; and that goal is achieved, however problematically, in each of the quests. When the interwoven quests, which begin in Book III, continue through Book IV, and, with Britomart's quest, into Book V, are separated out and explicated, these three books of Spenser's Faerie Queene can be read so as to constitute a social vision.




Spenser's Allegory


Book Description

Isabel MacCaffrey contends that, in allegory, the mind makes a model of itself, and she shows that The Faerie Queene, mirroring as it does the mind's structure, is both a treatise on and an example of the central role that imagination plays in human life. Viewing the poem as a model of Spenser's universe, the author investigates the poet's theory of knowledge and the role of imagination in the construction of cosmic models. She begins with a survey of theories of the imagination and the creation of fictions, establishing a context in which allegorical images may be understood throughout the European allegorical tradition to which The Faerie Queene belongs. Isabel MacCaffrey's new readings show that insofar as Spenser's poem concerns modes of knowledge, it offers the reader an anatomy of its own composition, an analysis of imagination in its varied relations to the world. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.










Spenser's World of Glass


Book Description

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.