Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism
(Paperback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism
By (Author) Catherine Nicholson
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press
4th August 2020
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Literature: history and criticism
Literary theory
Literary studies: poetry and poets
European history
821.3
Physical Properties
Paperback
312
Width 156mm, Height 235mm
Description
The four-hundred-year story of readers' struggles with a famously unreadable poem-and what they reveal about the history of reading and the future of literary studies "I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter with me" The plaint of an anonymous reader in 1712 sounds with endearing frankness a note o
Reviews
"This is an original and challenging book. Nicholson has mastered the complex history of Spenser criticism, and her supple, pointed prose carries its learning easily: Keatss advice to Shelley, Load every rift with ore (which, she points out in a fine passage, reworks Mammons to Guyon), might describe her own language. Its major work, fascinating in its account of Spensers readers and acute in its understanding of the poem."---William A. Oram, Modern Language Quarterly
"In tapping The Fairie Queenes history of undisciplined reading, Nicholson has helped to thaw some of the marmoreal frigidity with which twentieth century scholarship not infrequently imbued the poem. (Paradoxically, she has done so without herself sacrificing an iota of rigor.) Spenser himself might well have appreciated the project."---Raphael Magarik, MAKE Magazine
Author Bio
Catherine Nicholson is associate professor of English at Yale University and the author of Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance.
