Edmund Spenser's Poetry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 039309569X ISBN 13: 9780393095692

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc (Np), 1969

Building on the strengths of two previous editions, this revised and enlarged Third Edition continues to offer more of Spenser's poetry than any other comparable volume. All selections are based on early and established texts, fully glossed and precisely annotated, with an Editor's Note following each section.

To facilitate discussion of the place of the body and of pastoral elements in Spenser's epic, the Third Edition includes more of The Faerie Queene: from Book II, canto ix (the House of Alma), and from Book VI, the remainder of canto x and all of cantos xi-xii. The Shepheardes Calender is represented by six eclogues, including the much-discussed "Februarie." Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, increasingly a focus of critical attention, is an important addition, and Amoretti is offered in its entirety.

Seventeen critical essays, judiciously chosen from the many published since 1982, have been added to supplement eleven earlier commentaries. New to the Third Edition are the perspectives of Spenser's contemporary William Camden, Virginia Woolf, William Nelson, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Donald Cheney, Judith Anderson, Richard Helgerson, Louis Adrian Montrose, and David Lee Miller. The critical essays on the House of Busyrane, Spenser's pastoral, Muiopotmos, and Amoretti are grouped to "speak" to each other in ways sure to stimulate classroom discussion. This class-tested feature is back by popular demand along with essays by D. C. Allen, Robert A. Brinkley, Ronald P. Bond, Anne Lake Prescott, Andrew D. Weiner, Susanne Lindgren Wofford, Harry Berger, Jr., and Paul Alpers.

A Chronology of Spenser's life and an extensive Bibliography are also included.

About the Author:

Hugh Maclean was Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Albany. A Toronto Ph.D., he also taught at the Royal Military College of Canada and the University of Cincinnati. He was the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets and the author of numerous articles, including three in The Spenser Encyclopedia.

Anne Lake Prescott is Professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she was recently chair. A Columbia Ph.D., she has also taught in the Columbia graduate department. She is the author of French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation, many articles on Renaissance literature, and ten contributions to The Spenser Encyclopedia.