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Edmund Spenser: A Literary Life
Gary Waller surveys Spenser's career in terms of the material conditions of its production - the often overlooked material factors of race, gender, class, agency - and the resonant 'places' which influenced his career - court, church, nation, colony. The book includes an original account of the gender politics of Spenser's work and his difficult position between Ireland and England, the 'homes' about which he held ambivalent feelings. Waller also discusses the 'place' the biographer occupies in writing a literary life.
224 pages, Paperback
First published October 5, 1994
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March 10, 2026
A fascinating study not only of Spenser, his life and works, but also of literary biography itself.
I love the Literary Lives series from Palgrave Macmillan, and have greatly enjoyed other volumes. This volume was more academic than most, in that it considered various academic theories and approaches, and how they might apply to Spenser - rather than simply concentrating on Spenser himself - and so there was a level of meta commentary along with the actual consideration of an individual and his literary output. It would make a great textbook for a course on literary biography, and perhaps was even intended as such.
Chapter 1 considers the relationships between author, text and reader, as well as Spenser's identities in terms of class, race and gender. Chapter 2 carefully looks look into Spenser's "three worlds": the English court, Ireland, and poetry. Spenser was an intrinsic part of Elizabethan England's brutal colonising of Ireland, so that does cast rather a pall over how we think of him today.
Chapters 3-6 deal with the poetry itself. This brings wonderful nuggets of thought, such as the notion that Spenser's random / odd / multifarious spellings weren't only attributable to the Elizabethans' casual approach to consistency in spelling. He was actually layering extra meanings into the words, using spelling to draw in other words that either reinforce or complicate the original. Hence we rarely find "modern spelling" editions of The Faerie Queene (damn it!), as it would mean losing a layer of significance. (Alas, such things are probably lost on a reader like me, and perhaps would have been of most use to a contemporary reader who shared a similar vocabulary, but at least it's good to know what's happening and why.) Also, Chapter 6 contains a great take-down of Petrachism, and a consideration of Time in relation to Spenser's poem Mutability (assumed to be the core of a Book 7 of FQ that never got written).
Waller rounds this off with Chapter 7, an "Envoi", which discusses how we write literary lives from our individual subjectivities, inevitably tied to our own time and place.
This really has been a fascinating read, and is highly recommended to all who love literary biography and culture studies, as well as Spenser and his poetry!
I love the Literary Lives series from Palgrave Macmillan, and have greatly enjoyed other volumes. This volume was more academic than most, in that it considered various academic theories and approaches, and how they might apply to Spenser - rather than simply concentrating on Spenser himself - and so there was a level of meta commentary along with the actual consideration of an individual and his literary output. It would make a great textbook for a course on literary biography, and perhaps was even intended as such.
Chapter 1 considers the relationships between author, text and reader, as well as Spenser's identities in terms of class, race and gender. Chapter 2 carefully looks look into Spenser's "three worlds": the English court, Ireland, and poetry. Spenser was an intrinsic part of Elizabethan England's brutal colonising of Ireland, so that does cast rather a pall over how we think of him today.
Chapters 3-6 deal with the poetry itself. This brings wonderful nuggets of thought, such as the notion that Spenser's random / odd / multifarious spellings weren't only attributable to the Elizabethans' casual approach to consistency in spelling. He was actually layering extra meanings into the words, using spelling to draw in other words that either reinforce or complicate the original. Hence we rarely find "modern spelling" editions of The Faerie Queene (damn it!), as it would mean losing a layer of significance. (Alas, such things are probably lost on a reader like me, and perhaps would have been of most use to a contemporary reader who shared a similar vocabulary, but at least it's good to know what's happening and why.) Also, Chapter 6 contains a great take-down of Petrachism, and a consideration of Time in relation to Spenser's poem Mutability (assumed to be the core of a Book 7 of FQ that never got written).
Waller rounds this off with Chapter 7, an "Envoi", which discusses how we write literary lives from our individual subjectivities, inevitably tied to our own time and place.
This really has been a fascinating read, and is highly recommended to all who love literary biography and culture studies, as well as Spenser and his poetry!
Displaying 1 of 1 review