Edmund Spenser

<p>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 <i>The Shepeardes Calenda</i>r, to his unfinished crowning work,<i>The Fairie Queene</i>. 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.</p> <p>General Editor's Preface Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction 2. Barbarous Tongues: The ideology of poetic form <em>(Richard Helgerson)</em> 3. 'The Perfecte Paterne of a Poet': The poetics of courtship in The Shepeardes Calender (<i>Louis Montrose</i>). 4. Spenser's Complaints (<i>Richard Ramuss</i>) 5. Spenser's Poetics: The Poem's two bodies (<i>David Lee Miller</i>). 6. To Fashion a Gentleman: Spenser and the destruction of the Bower of Bliss (<i>Stephen Greenblatt</i>) 7. Singing Unsung Heroines: Androgynous discourse in Book III of the Faerie Queene (<i>Lauren Silberman</i>) 8. 'Endlesse Worke' (<i>Jonathan Goldberg</i>) 9. Praise and Defence of the Queen in The Faerie Queene, Book V <i>(Pamela Joseph Benson</i>) 10. The 'Sacred Hunger of Ambitious Minds: Spenser's savage religion (<i>Andrew Hadfield</i>) 11. The Colonization of Language: Narrative strategies in The Faerie Queene, Book VI (<i>Anne Fogarty</i>) 12. Mapping Mutability: or Spenser's Irish Plot (<i>Julia Reinhard Lupton</i>). Notes on author Further reading Index</p>