Description
Book SynopsisThis book provides a radical reading of Edmund Spenser and argues for a re-orientation in Renaissance criticism.
Trade ReviewRadical Spenser's fusion of an Adorno-led new aesthetics with earlier work on pastoral by William Empson is innovative and sophisticated!The reader comes away with a nuanced understanding of poems that are, it is true, not nearly as simple as New Historicist critics sometimes make them appear. Radical Spenser's fusion of an Adorno-led new aesthetics with earlier work on pastoral by William Empson is innovative and sophisticated!The reader comes away with a nuanced understanding of poems that are, it is true, not nearly as simple as New Historicist critics sometimes make them appear.
Table of ContentsIntroduction; I Reading; 1. 'The Essential Trick': Pastoral, New Historicism and the Aesthetic; II. Poetry; 2. Spenser's 'Critic Pen' in The Shepheardes Calender; 3. Ways In: The Pastoral Paratexts of The Faerie Queene; 4. Spenser's mode of Transport: The Faerie Queene, Books II-IV; 5. Political Poetry? The Faerie Queene, Books V-VI; III Environment; 6. Green Spenser: Mutabilitie and Others; 7. Spenser's Irish Environment: A View of the State of Ireland.
