EDMUND SPENSER
Supposed Edmund Spenser's Oil Paintings by Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Dates: 1552-1599
Nationality: British
Literary Periods:
Elizabethan Period, 1558-1603
Renaissance Period, 1500-1660
Tudor Period, 1500-1603
SPACE
Depicting Una of The Faerie Queene by Briton Rivière, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCE & BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Scribner Writers Series [Database]
Biography on the life and works of Edmund Spenser, complete works and suggested reading bibliographies
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- Literature Online (LION)Biographical overview, complete bibliography, journal articles, audio & video recordings, and recommended Web sites
RESEARCH & CRITICISM
Books, essays, and journal articles indexed in MLA International Bibliography 
[Database]
MLA International Bibliography is the definitive literary research database, indexing the most authoritative Spenser scholarship published in books and academic journals. MLA indexes and links to the entire JSTOR literary research collection as well as linking to many other full-text providers and the Colby College Libraries catalog. If you discover books or articles through MLA that are not available at Colby or through our lending partners, please request these items using your ILLiad Account.
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A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies (2006) by
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.
Call Number: Miller PR2364 .C68 2006ISBN: 9781403920270
The Cambridge Companion to Spenser (2001) by
The Cambridge Companion to Spenser provides an introduction to Spenser that is at once accessible and rigorous. Fourteen specially commissioned essays by leading scholars bring together the best recent writing on the work of the most important non-dramatic Renaissance poet. The contributions provide all the essential information required to appreciate and understand Spenser's rewarding and challenging work. The Companion guides the reader through Spenser's poetry and prose, and provides extensive commentary on his life, the historical and religious context in which he wrote, his wide reading in Classical, European and English poetry, his sexual politics and use of language. Emphasis is placed on Spenser's relationship to his native England, and to Ireland - where he lived for most of his adult life - as well as the myriad of intellectual contexts which inform his writing. A chronology and further reading lists make this volume indispensable for any student of Spenser.
Call Number: Miller PR2364 .C36 2001ISBN: 0521641993
Exemplary Spenser (2018) by
Exemplary Spenser analyses the didactic poetics of The Faerie Queene, renewing attention to its avowed attempt to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" and examining how Spenser mobilises his pedagogic concerns through the reading experience of the poem. Grogan's investigation shows how Spenser transacts the public life of the nation heuristically, prompting a reflective reading experience that compels engagement with other readers, other texts and other political communities. Negotiating between competing pedagogical traditions, she shows how Spenser's epic challenges the more conservative prevailing impulses of humanist pedagogy to espouse a radical didacticism capable of inventing a more active and responsible reader. To this end, Grogan examines a wide variety of Spenser's techniques and sources, including Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy and the powerful visually-couched epistemological paradigms of early modern culture, ekphrasis among them. Importantly, Grogan examines how Spenser's didactic poetics was crucially shaped by readings of the Greek historian Xenophon's Cyropaedia, a text and influence previously overlooked by critics. Grogan concludes by reading the last book of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of Courtesy, as an attempt to reconcile his own didactic sources and poetics with the more recent tastes of his contemporaries for a courtesy theory less concerned with "vertuous and gentle discipline". Returning to the early modern reading experience, Grogan shows the sophisticated intertextual dexterity that goes into reading Spenser, where Spenserian pedagogy lies not simply in the textual body of the poem, but also in the act of reading it.
Call Number: Miller PR2358 .G75 2009ISBN: 9780754666981
Ceremonies of Innocence (1989) by
Ceremonies of Innocence, originally published in 1989, was the most comprehensive study of pastoralism in Edmund Spenser's poetry undertaken. The book traces the evolution of Spenser's own role as a poet in Elizabethan courtly society through an examination of his use and definition of pastoral. Rather than concentrating exclusively on his works in pastoral genres, it includes pastoral themes, motifs, and patterns in all of the works against the background of ideas about the contemplative life, medieval allegorical readings of Virgil, and the pastoral as an established courtly mode. It specific thesis is that Spenser gradually evolves a 'pastoral of contemplation' as against the sychophantic 'pastoral of power' identified by some Spenser and Renaissance scholars.
Call Number: Colby PR2367.P34 B4 1989ISBN: 0521362520
Spenser's Images of Life (1967) by
This 1967 book was compiled by Alastair Fowler from notes left by C. S. Lewis at his death. It is Lewis longest piece of literary criticism, as distinct from literary history. It approaches The Faerie Queene as a majestic pageant of the universe and nature, celebrating God as 'the glad creator', and argues that conventional views of epic and allegory must be modified if the poem is to be fully enjoyed and understood.
Call Number: Colby PR2364 .L4 1967ISBN: 0521055466
PRIMARY SOURCES: TEXTS
The faerie queene (1989) by
Provides full annotation of the text, detailed guidance to critical comment past and present, and a wealth of introductory material setting the poem in its full historical and literary context.
Call Number: Miller PR2358.A3 H27 1980ISBN: 0582497051
Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion: a Critical Edition (1997) by
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Call Number: Miller PR2360 .A5 1997ISBN: 0866981861
