Spenser S Britomart

'This masterly work ought to be The Elizabethan Encyclopedia, and no less.' - Cahiers Elizabethains Edmund Spenser remains one of Britain's most famous poets. With nearly 700 entries this Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive one-stop reference tool for: * appreciating Spenser's poetry in the context of his age and our own * understanding the language, themes and characters of the poems * easy to find entries arranged by subject.

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"The importance of Dunseath's study is that it proposes an original interpretation of the allegory of The Faerie Queene, Book V, and a fresh theory of its poetic function.... It brings new material into play, and offers a sensible, integrated reading of many of the poem’s most important passages, so that it may well prove a pace-setter for this kind of Spenserian study."—Alastair Fowler, Brasenose College, Oxford. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The question of selfhood in Renaissance texts constitutes a scholarly and critical debate of almost unmanageable proportions. The author of this work begins by questioning the strategies with which male writers depict powerful women. Although Spenser's Britomart, Shakespeare's Cleopatra, and Milton's Eve figure selfhood very differently and to very different ends, they do have two significant elements in common: mirrors and transformations that diminish the power of the female self.

In this accessible introduction to Spenser's poetry and prose, a set of fourteen essays provide extensive commentary on his life and the historical and religious contexts in which he wrote

Spenser's Allegory of Love approaches the major characters in Books III, IV, and V of The Faerie Queene as fictional personages who function psychically according to Renaissance sexual psychology and physically according to Renaissance sexual physiology. This approach enables readings of the quests in their own peculiar, allegorical way as imitations of actions. For each of the questers - Britomart, Florimell, Scudamour, and Timias - union with a loved one is the goal; and that goal is achieved, however problematically, in each of the quests. When the interwoven quests, which begin in Book III, continue through Book IV, and, with Britomart's quest, into Book V, are separated out and explicated, these three books of Spenser's Faerie Queene can be read so as to constitute a social vision.