Spenser In The Moment

Spenser in the Moment collects specially commissioned essays critical of established readings, each of which in surveying the state of the art attempts radically to unsettle our conception of the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552–1599). The editors were drawn together by a shared restlessness with the canonical Spenser, and a sense that attention especially to Spenser’s musical qualities, and the distinctiveness of his poetic style compared with that of his contemporaries, could display exciting new paths forward. Scholars from three continents contribute bracing reviews of Spenser’s relationship with his classical sources, with religious history, and the history of the book. Two essays consider Spenser and music, both music in Spenser’s works, and Spenser’s works in the music of his time. Two working poets inaugurate the final group of essays on Spenser’s poetry, with original, irreverent poetry reflecting and riffing on Spenser. The essays argue for various versions of revolution: one mixing aesthetics and sex, another diagnosing widespread fallacies (“expressivist” and “dramatistic”) made in reading Spenser, and the last arguing for a Spenser not of enormous interlocking networks, but of the moment: that the primary Spenserian structure is that of a moment of stillness-in-motion. With so much change behind us already in this young century, another series of changes emerges from recent work, and a sense of expectation, as of held breath, seems to pervade the discipline—that is the moment that this volume attempts to capture and nourish.

Gordon Teskey restores Edmund Spenser to prominence, revealing his epic The Faerie Queene as a grand, improvisatory project on human nature. Teskey compares Spenser to Milton, an avowed follower. While Milton’s rigid ideology is now stale, Spenser’s allegories remain vital, inviting new questions and visions, heralding a constantly changing future.

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Spenser in the Moment argues that contrary to anyone's expectation, Spenser studies may be on the brink of a revolution. Bringing together scholars from three continents, it surveys established methods, and then makes the case that there may be whole worlds of Spenser that have been nearly unsee-able or unhearable in the past forty years.

Investigating a new client's unfaithful wife, Boston private eye Spenser finds himself in trouble when the case goes terribly wrong and three people wind up dead, a situation that reveals the wife's lover's ties to a terrorist organization.

In Spenser's Forms of History, Bart Van Es presents an engaging study of the ways in which Edmund Spenser utilized a number of "forms of history"--chronicle, antiquarian discourse, secular typology, political prophecy, and others--in both his poetry and his prose, and assesses their collective impact on Elizabethan poetry.

From the distinguished literary scholar Gordon Teskey comes an essay collection that restores Spenser to his rightful prominence in Renaissance studies, opening up the epic of The Faerie Queene as a grand, improvisatory project on human nature, and arguing—controversially—that it is Spenser, not Milton, who is the more important and relevant poet for the modern world. There is more adventure in The Faerie Queene than in any other major English poem. But the epic of Arthurian knights, ladies, and dragons in Faerie Land, beloved by C. S. Lewis, is often regarded as quaint and obscure, and few critics have analyzed the poem as an experiment in open thinking. In this remarkable collection, the renowned literary scholar Gordon Teskey examines the masterwork with care and imagination, explaining the theory of allegory—now and in Edmund Spenser’s Elizabethan age—and illuminating the poem’s improvisatory moments as it embarks upon fairy tale, myth, and enchantment. Milton, often considered the greatest English poet after Shakespeare, called Spenser his “original.” But Teskey argues that while Milton’s rigid ideology in Paradise Lost has failed the test of time, Spenser’s allegory invites engagement on contemporary terms ranging from power, gender, violence, and virtue ethics, to mobility, the posthuman, and the future of the planet. The Faerie Queene was unfinished when Spenser died in his forties. It is the brilliant work of a poet of youthful energy and philosophical vision who opens up new questions instead of answering old ones. The epic’s grand finale, “The Mutabilitie Cantos,” delivers a vision of human life as dizzyingly turbulent and constantly changing, leaving a future open to everything.

Edmund Spenser (?1554-99) was the greatest Elizabethan poet, whose Shepheardes Calender (1579) inaugurated a revolution in English poetry, and whose unfinished Faerie Queene (1590-6) was the longest and most accomplished poem written in the sixteenth century. In his approachable and informative study, Colin Burrow clarifies the genres and conventions at work in Spenser's poem. He explores the poet's taste for archaism and allegory, and the nature of epic and of heroism in The Faerie Queene. He presents Spenser as a 'Renaissance' poet who is drawn at once to images of vital rebirth and of mortal frailty. In clear, jargon-free prose he examines Spenser's equivocal relationship with his Queen and with the Irish landscape in which he spent his mature years. Spenser emerges from this book a less orthodox and harmonious poet than he is often thought to be, but as a complex, thoughtful, and attractive writer.