The art of <i>The Faerie Queene</i>

Richard Danson Brown, Joshua Samuel Reid

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781526151797
  9780719087325
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526134639
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Art of The Faerie Queene is the first book centrally focused on the forms and poetic techniques employed by Spenser. It offers a sharp new perspective on Spenser by rereading The Faerie Queene as poetry which is at once absorbing, demanding and experimental. Instead of the traditional conservative model of Spenser as poet, this book presents the poem as radical, edgy and unconventional, thus proposing new ways of understanding the Elizabethan poetic Renaissance. The book moves from the individual words of the poem to metre, rhyme and stanza form onto its larger structures of canto and book. It will be of particular relevance to undergraduates studying Elizabethan poetry, graduate students and scholars of Renaissance poetry, for whom the formal aspect of the poetry has been a topic of growing relevance in recent years.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: tightrope walking in an afflicted style
• 1 Doubtful words: the vocabulary of The Faerie Queene
• 2 Uncommon lines: lineation and metre
• 3 Proportionable returns: rhyme, meaning and experience
• 4 Unusual staff: the archaeology of the Spenserian stanza
• 5 Another cast in different hews: canto form
• 6 Spacious ways: narratives and narrators
• Appendix: stanza lead words
• Bibliography
• Index