Edmund Spenser


Book Description

Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'-- a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted. In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' -- writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen -- than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work? Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.




Edmund Spenser


Book Description

Gary Waller surveys Spenser's career in terms of the material conditions of its production - the often overlooked material factors of race, gender, class, agency - and the resonant 'places' which influenced his career - court, church, nation, colony. The book includes an original account of the gender politics of Spenser's work and his difficult position between Ireland and England, the 'homes' about which he held ambivalent feelings. Waller also discusses the 'place' the biographer occupies in writing a literary life.
















The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser


Book Description

The first comprehensive collection of the shorter poems since the Variorum minor poems of the 40s. Cloth edition ($55.) not seen by R&R. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.




Edmund Spenser


Book Description

This is a collection of wide-ranging papers on Edmund Spenser, including criticism on the Shepheardes Calender, Spenser's rhymes, his impact on Louis MacNeice, the medieval organizations of the Faerie Queene, on the Mutabilite Cantos, Temperance in Book II, and Friendship in Book IV, Written by younger as well as by well-established scholars, the contributors move quietly away from theoretically dominated criticism, and emphasize the importance of historical criticism, both breaking new ground and recuperating neglected insights and approaches. The introduction describes and defends the current trend towards a renewed historical criticism in Spenser criticism. The papers contribute to our knowledge of Spenser's life as well as to our understanding of his poetry. J. B. Lethbridge lectures at the English seminar at Tubingen University.




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