Julie Bozza’s Reviews > Edmund Spenser: A Literary Life > Status Update

Wow! And the last short chapter, or "Envoi", provides meta discussion of how we write literary lives from each our own individual subjectivities. This has been a fascinating ride!

Chapter 6 includes great critique of Petrachism and consideration of Time. Top stuff.

"The seemingly arbitrary spelling cannot quite be explained by the looseness of Elizabethan orthography. To modernise his language or remove his archaisms would be to distort his most distinctive verbal effects, many of which are achieved through variant spellings. Spenser delights in wrestling with words to make them contain multiple or contradictory meanings, or underlining their primary one." [paraphrased]

Chapter Two was a careful look into Spenser's "three worlds": the English court, Ireland, and poetry. It's impossible to sympathise with his colonial attitudes towards the Irish. Which rather taints the whole project. But this is otherwise an interesting chapter.

I love the Literary Lives series; this seems more academic than most. Chapter 1 is a tour de force considering the relationships between author, text and reader, as well as Spenser's identities in terms of class, race and gender. Terrific stuff.