Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed DirectionsEdited by J. B. Lethbridge
About the Editor :
J. B. Lethbridge was educated in England, the United States, and Scotland. He has lectured at colleges and universities in England and the United States. Since 1995 Dr. Lethbridge has lectured at the English Seminar of Tübingen University.
The developing trend away from theoretical toward historical criticism is illustrated in eleven papers on Edmund Spenser’s poetry, life, and thought, and recent approaches to them. The Introduction sketches the present state of Spenser criticism. Then, a wide range of aspects of Spenser’s life and work are studied: the nature of the gods in the Shepheardes Calendar, the Irish allegories in Muiopotmos, rhyme in The Faerie Queene, Louis Macneice’s use of Spenser, the medieval storage and retrieval organization of The Faerie Queene, Obvidian Temperance in Book II, the moral impact of Friendship in Books III and IV, the myth of the Return from Faerie Land, Spenser’s myths of crossing borders, and the date and the significance of the Mutabilitie Cantos. Both modern techniques of close reading and renewed forms of the older techniques of practical criticism are put to work in understanding the poems historically; intellectual background studies are revived by recent approaches to intertextuality and cultural studies and the resources of anthropological criticism; formalist techniques are made to reveal important historical information.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Recuperating the Return to History
J. B. Lethbridge
Pastoral Motivation in The Shepheardes Calendar
John Moore
Plucking the Perrot: Muiopotmos and Irish Politics
Thomas Herron
“Well Grounded, Finely Framed, and Strongly Trussed up Together”: The “Medieval” Structure of The Faerie Queene
Andrew King
Acrasia and Bondage: Guyon’s Perversion of the Ovidian Erotic in Book II of The Faerie Queene
Syrithe Pugh
Raleigh, Spenser, and Elizabeth: Acts of Friendship in The Faerie Queene, Book IV
Graham Atkin
Britomart’s Gone Abroad to Brute-land, Colin Clout’s Come Courting from the Salvage Ire-land: Exile and the Kingdom in Some of Spenser’s Fictions for “Crossing Over”
James Nohrnberg
Mutabilitie’s Debatable Land: Spenser’s Ireland and the Frontiers of Faerie
E. A. F. Porges Watson
Spenser’s Last Days: Ireland, Career, Mutability, Allegory
J. B. Lethbridge
Rhyming Against the Grain: A New Look at the Spenserian Stanza
Catherine Addison
MacNeice in Fairy Land
Richard Danson Brown
Index ISBN 0-8386-4066-4
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