Manchester University Press The Art of the Faerie Queene: Space, Time and the Embodied Description of the Past (The Manchester Spenser)

The art of The Faerie Queene is the first book centrally focused on the forms and poetic techniques employed by Spenser. Though much scholarly attention in recent years has been on the relationships between Spenser’s poetry and political and colonial history, the place of his epic in literary history has received less attention. This book aims to rectify that by rereading The Faerie Queene as poetry which is at once absorbing, demanding and experimental. The Spenser explored here ingeniously uses the tricks of his poetic style to amplify his symbolic agendas and to deepen the reading experience. One of the book’s particular originalities is the way in which it reframes Spenser’s place in literary history. As opposed to the stylistic conservatism diagnosed by previous generations of scholars, The art of The Faerie Queene presents the poem as more radical, more edgy and less conventional, particularly as it appeared to Spenser’s first readers. As such, the book proposes new ways of understanding the Elizabethan poetic Renaissance and the ways in which Spenser is best understood in terms of literary history. The book progresses from the choice of individual words through to questions of metre, rhyme and stanza form up to the larger structures of canto, book and the incomplete yet massive poem itself. It will be of particular relevance to undergraduates studying Elizabethan poetry, and graduate students and scholars of Renaissance poetry, for whom the formal aspect of the poetry has been a topic of growing relevance in recent years.