Sidney Spenser And The Royal Reader

Elizabeth I of England, as a female monarch who did not heed counsel, particularly in the events surrounding the marriage proposal from the much younger Roman Catholic Duke of Alençon and Anjou (c 1579–1586), aroused anxiety and frustration in her Protestant male courtiers. Two of these, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, expressed their dissatisfaction about the “courteous cruell” queen in their literary works and letters. The relationship between the two men was also complex, united as they were in politics, arguing for a strong interventionist role for England in Europe, but divided in poetics. Sidney advocated a classical model for English vernacular poetry while Spenser favoured a homegrown English strain harking back to Chaucer and Skelton. Thoroughly researched and written in an accessible style with close readings of all the major works of Sidney and Spenser that are linked to Elizabeth I, along with a look at their correspondence, this book provides a new way of interweaving the narratives of history and literature, and will be of interest to the academician and the lay reader alike in its analysis of the workings of gender, desire, politics and poetics in the reign of Elizabeth I.

Sixteen leading scholars explore the richness of King James's work from a variety of perspectives, and in so doing seek to establish monarchic writing as an important genre in its own right. Best known for his landmark version of the Protestant Bible, James VI (1566-1625) of Scotland, who succeeded Elizabeth I to the English throne, was truly a monarch of the word. From religious prose and verse to political treatises and social works to love poems and witty doggerel, James used writing and the print media to inspire his subjects, govern them, keep his enemies at bay, and even examine his own authority. Until now, the full span of James's work has received little critical attention by political and literary historians. In Royal Subjects, sixteen leading scholars explore the richness of his oeuvre from a variety of perspectives, and in so doing seek to establish monarchic writing as an important genre in its own right. Through its unprecedented look at monarchic writing, Royal Subjects not only enriches our understanding of the reign of James VI and I but also offers fruitful suggestions for approaches to other Renaissance texts and other periods.

Royal Poetrie is the first book to address the significance of a distinctive body of verse from the English Renaissance—poems produced by the Tudor-Stuart monarchs Henry VIII, Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I. Not surprisingly, Henry VIII is no John Donne, but the unique political and poetic complications raised by royal endeavors at authorship imbue this literature with special interest. Peter C. Herman is particularly intrigued by how the monarchs' poems express and extend their power and control. Monarchs turned to verse especially at moments when they considered their positions insecure or when they were seeking to aggregate more power to themselves. Far from reflecting absolute authority, monarchic verse often reveals the need for authority to defend itself against considerable, effective opposition that was often close at hand. In monarchic verse, Herman argues, one can see monarchs asserting their significance and appropriating images of royalty to enhance their power and their position. Sometimes, as in the cases of Henry and Elizabeth, they are successful; sometimes, as for James, they are not. For Mary Stuart, the results were disastrous. Herman devotes a chapter each to the poetic endeavors of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I. His introduction addresses the tradition of monarchic verse in England and on the continent as well as the textual issues presented by these texts. A brief postscript examines the verses that circulated under Charles I's name after his execution. In an argument enhanced by carefully chosen illustrations, Herman places monarchic verse within the visual and other cultural traditions of the day.

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 of consternation that resonates throughout The Faerie Queene's reception history, from its first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, who urged him to write anything else instead, to Virginia Woolf, who insisted that if one wants to like the poem, "the first essential is, of course, not to read" it. For more than four centuries critics have sought to counter this strain of readerly resistance, but rather than trying to remedy the frustrations and failures of Spenser's readers, Catherine Nicholson cherishes them as a sensitive barometer of shifts in the culture of reading itself. Indeed, tracking the poem's mixed fortunes in the hands of its bored, baffled, outraged, intoxicated, obsessive, and exhausted readers turns out to be an excellent way of rethinking the past and future prospects of literary study. By examining the responses of readers from Queen Elizabeth and the keepers of Renaissance commonplace books to nineteenth-century undergraduates, Victorian children, and modern scholars, this book offers a compelling new interpretation of the poem and an important new perspective on what it means to read, or not to read, a work of literature.

This Volume Of Essays Examines Some Of The Important Issues In Indian English Literature Emerging Both From Its Search For A New Sense Of Identity And Its Affiliation To A Global Perspective In The Wake Of Post Colonialism. The Essays Comprising This Volume Address Topics Such As Nation And Nationalism, Hybridization And Assimilation, Problems Of Exile And Migration, The Question Of Location And Boundaries And The Place Of Indian English Literature In The Changing Canon Of English Studies. By Focusing On The Shifting Paradigms Of Indian English Literature As A Part Of The Subtle Transformation Of The Global Configurations Of English, The Volume Attempts To Place The Genre Of This Writing Within A Broad Range Of Issues Stemming From The Peculiar And Problematic Role Of English As A Creative Medium Deployed In Various Ways In The Countries Which Were Once A Part Of The British Empire. For Illustrative Diagnostic Purposes Some Important Writers Like Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Attia Hosain, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy Are Included In This Volume. But The Overall Focus Of This Volume Is Not On The Individual Writers Or Texts And Their Close Readings, But On Conceptual And Ideological Formations Of The Genre Of Indian English Literature And The Way It Has Entered The Canon Of English Studies In India Both In Its Contestatory And Collaborative Modes.

Approaching the writings of Mary Wroth through a fresh 21st-century lens, this volume accounts for and re-invents the literary scholarship of one of the first "canonized" women writers of the English Renaissance. Essays present different practices that emerge around "reading" Wroth, including editing, curating, and digital reproduction.

This book reveals the queen behind Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Placing Spenser’s epic poem in the context of the tumultuous sixteenth century, Donald Stump offers a groundbreaking reading of the poem as an allegory of Elizabeth I’s life. By narrating the loves and wars of an Arthurian realm that mirrors Elizabethan England, Spenser explores the crises that shaped Elizabeth’s reign: her break with the pope to create a reformed English Church, her standoff with Mary, Queen of Scots, offensives against Irish rebels and Spanish troops, confrontations with assassins and foreign invaders, and the apocalyptic expectations of the English people in a time of national transformation. Brilliantly reconciling moral and historicist readings, this volume offers a major new interpretation of The Faerie Queene.

Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature brings together key works in early modern science and imaginative literature (from the anatomy of William Harvey and the experimentalism of William Gilbert to the fictions of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Margaret Cavendish). The book documents how what have become our two cultures of belief define themselves through a shared aesthetics that understands knowledge as an act of making. Within this framework, literary texts gain substance and intelligibility by being considered as instances of early modern knowledge production. At the same time, early modern science maintains strong affiliations with poetry because it understands art as a basis for producing knowledge. In identifying these interconnections between literature and science, this book contributes to scholarship in literary history, history of reading and the book, science studies and the history of academic disciplines.