Spenser's Forms of History
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:26th Sep '02
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
In Spenser's Forms of History, Bart van Es describes six modes through which Early Modern England addressed the past: chronicle, chorography, antiquarian discourse, euhemerism, typology, and prophecy. By setting this material alongside the works of Edmund Spenser, the book explores allusive strategies ranging in effect from euology to polemic. Key Spenserian texts, including The Faerie Queene, The Shepeardes Calendar, and A View of the Present State of Ireland, are read against Elizabethan cultural documents extending from popular print to restricted manuscripts. Over the course of six chapters, each focusing on a single 'form', the book shows Spenser to have been an exceptional historical thinker. Drawing on recent studies of nationhood, the study not only offers a new picture of the English 'Poet Historical', but also makes an innovative contribution to current debates concerning the relationship between literature and history.
Essential for all Spenserians, Bart van Es's book has much to recommend it to students of early modern Britain. * Thomas Healy, TLS, April 2005 *
... graceful and important book ... Van Es draws impressively on historically-orientated Renaissance studies of the last twenty years or so while bringing to bear sensitive reading of Spenser's own work as the poet grapples with the various modes of understanding history available in Elizabethan England. * Renaissance Quarterly *
Van Es has taken that next step in historicist analysis of literature: to subject modes of historical thinking to examination and to accord equal respect and attention to literary and historical texts. Van Es finds in Spenser "a profound, playful, and above all multiform sense of the past". Spenser's Forms of History provides an extremely useful overview of modes of Elizabethan historical thinking and provocative guide to thinking about Spenser in relation to multiform Elizabethan historicism. * Renaissance Quarterly *
ISBN: 9780199249701
Dimensions: 223mm x 146mm x 18mm
Weight: unknown
244 pages