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General Editor: Stan Smith
Professor of English, University of Dundee
This important series takes full account of contemporary literary theory, providing collections of key modern readings of major authors, genres and critical approaches. Prefaced by a wide-ranging editorial introduction setting the readings in context and exploring the issues they raise, individual volumes in the series offer the student authoritative and stimulating guides to the best theoretically-informed critical work on subjects from Chaucer to the present.
This collection represents some of the best recent critical writing on Edmund Spenser, a major Renaissance English poet who has helped to inspire some of the most vigorous critical movements within recent English studies. The essays cover the whole range of Spenser's work, from his early literary experiments such as the Shepeardes Calender, to his unfinished crowning work, The Faerie Queene, and his controversial treatise, A View of the Present State of Ireland. The collection presents a wide range of critical responses, including the important new historicist work of Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose and Richard Helgerson, the post-structuralist and psychoanalytic readings of Jonathan Goldberg and David Lee Miller and the femminist analyses of Pamela Benson and Lauren Silberman, as well as other essays by leading American, British and Irish scholars.
The introduction provides an overview of critical responses to Spenser, setting his work and the debates which it has generated in their respective contexts. Further guidance for the reader is provided by the headnotes to the essays and the annotated bibliography.
This volume will be of value to students of English literature at undergraduate and postgraduate levels as well as to lecturers.
Andrew Hadfield is Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published widely on Spenser in articles for academic journals and books.
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