Author: Richard C. Frushell Publisher: Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
Concerned primarily with The Faerie Oueene, to which the extensive bibliography is devoted, these original essays constitute an important statement on twentieth-century Spenser studies. The eight United States and Canadianscholars who contributed to this volume reflect no particular point of view, nor espouse any single technique, approach, or subject matter. Taken together, however, the essays prove to be remarkably consonant in their twentieth-century view of Spenser's capaciousness. The contributors, in addition to the editors, are Rudolf B. Gottfried, A. C. Hamilton, S. K. Heninger, Jr., A. Kent Hieatt, Carol V. Kaske, and Foster Provost. Students of Renaissance English literature will find that the volume is not only an important reference work but also an extremely useful overview of the entire range of Spenserian scholarship.
Author: Kenneth Borris Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192533770 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 267
Book Description
Platonic concerns and conceptions profoundly affected early modern English and continental poetics, yet the effects have had little attention. This book defines Platonism's roles in early modern theories of literature, then reappraise the Platonizing major poet Edmund Spenser. It makes important new contributions to the knowledge of early modern European poetics and advances our understanding of Spenser's role and significance in English literary history. Literary Platonism energized pursuits of the sublime, and knowledge of this approach to poetry yields cogent new understandings of Spenser's poetics, his principal texts, his poetic vocation, and his cultural influence. By combining Christian resources with doctrines of Platonic poetics such as the poet's and lover's inspirational furies, the revelatory significance of beauty, and the importance of imitating exalted ideals rather than the world, he sought to attain a visionary sublimity that would ensure his enduring national significance, and he thereby became a seminal figure in the English literary "line of vision" including Milton and Blake among others. Although readings of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender typically bypass Plato's Phaedrus, this text deeply informs the Calender's treatments of beauty, inspiration, poetry's psychagogic power, and its national responsibilities. In The Faerie Queene, both heroism and visionary poetics arise from the stimuli of love and beauty conceived Platonically, and idealized mimesis produces its faeryland. Faery's queen, projected from Elizabeth I as in Platonic idealization of the beloved, not only pertains to temporal governance but also points toward the transcendental Ideas and divinity. Whereas Plato's Republic valorizes philosophy for bringing enlightenment to counter society's illusions, Spenser champions the learned and enraptured poetic imagination, and proceeds as such a philosopher-poet.
Author: David Hill Radcliffe Publisher: Camden House ISBN: 9781571130730 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
This book considers four centuries of Spenser criticism, locating critics in ongoing discussions of Spenser's poetry and the cultural contexts of their time.
Author: Andrew Hiscock Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199672806 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 849
Book Description
This handbook scrutinises the links between English literature and religion, specifically in the early modern period; the interactions between the two fields are explored through an examination of the literary impact the British church had on published work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Author: Tamsin Badcoe Publisher: Manchester Spenser ISBN: 9781526139672 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
Edmund Spenser and the romance of space advances the exploration of literary space into new areas, firstly by taking advantage of recent interdisciplinary interests in the spatial qualities of early modern thought and culture, and secondly by reading literature concerning the art of cosmography and navigation alongside imaginative literature with the purpose of identifying shared modes and preoccupations. The book looks to the work of cultural and historical geographers in order to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in the development of geographical knowledge: contexts ultimately employed by the study to achieve a better understanding of the place of Ireland in Spenser's writing. The study also engages with recent ecocritical approaches to literary environments, such as coastlines, wetlands, and islands, thus framing fresh readings of Spenser's handling of mixed genres.
Author: Gordon Teskey Publisher: Belknap Press ISBN: 0674988442 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 553
Book Description
From the distinguished literary scholar Gordon Teskey comes an essay collection that restores Spenser to his rightful prominence in Renaissance studies, opening up the epic of The Faerie Queene as a grand, improvisatory project on human nature, and arguing—controversially—that it is Spenser, not Milton, who is the more important and relevant poet for the modern world. There is more adventure in The Faerie Queene than in any other major English poem. But the epic of Arthurian knights, ladies, and dragons in Faerie Land, beloved by C. S. Lewis, is often regarded as quaint and obscure, and few critics have analyzed the poem as an experiment in open thinking. In this remarkable collection, the renowned literary scholar Gordon Teskey examines the masterwork with care and imagination, explaining the theory of allegory—now and in Edmund Spenser’s Elizabethan age—and illuminating the poem’s improvisatory moments as it embarks upon fairy tale, myth, and enchantment. Milton, often considered the greatest English poet after Shakespeare, called Spenser his “original.” But Teskey argues that while Milton’s rigid ideology in Paradise Lost has failed the test of time, Spenser’s allegory invites engagement on contemporary terms ranging from power, gender, violence, and virtue ethics, to mobility, the posthuman, and the future of the planet. The Faerie Queene was unfinished when Spenser died in his forties. It is the brilliant work of a poet of youthful energy and philosophical vision who opens up new questions instead of answering old ones. The epic’s grand finale, “The Mutabilitie Cantos,” delivers a vision of human life as dizzyingly turbulent and constantly changing, leaving a future open to everything.
Author: Bart Van Es Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0230524567 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 326
Book Description
This book provides an authoritative guide to debate on Elizabethan England's poet laureate. It covers key topics and provides histories for all of the primary texts. Some of today's most prominent Spenser scholars offer accounts of debates on the poet, from the Renaissance to the present day. Essential for those producing new research on Spenser.
Author: Richard C. Frushell
Author: Kenneth Borris
Author: David Hill Radcliffe
Author: Hazel Wilkinson
Author: Andrew Hiscock
Author: Tamsin Badcoe
Author: Gordon Teskey
Author: Edmund Spenser
Author: Bart Van Es
Author: Darryl J. Gless