Textual Respect and Situated Readings of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne

Essays in Honor of Judith H. Anderson

Tamara A. Goeglein, Jennifer C. Vaught

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781501521362
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501517969
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The original essays in this collection extend the reach and relevance of Judith H. Anderson's scholarship. The distinguished contributors situate their close readings of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne in the cultural weight of single words; in matters of mythic space and messianic time; and in the limits of surface reading, mimesis, dramatic character, and figures like the non sequitur. Their methods—computational, rhetorical, intertextual— pursue questions central to narrative, postcritical, and feminist theories.

Contributors: Richard Danson Brown, Patrick Cheney, Rachel Eisendrath, Tamara A. Goeglein, David Lee Miller, William A. Oram, Sean H. McDowell, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Melissa E. Sanchez, Anita Gilman Sherman, Gordon Teskey, and Jennifer C. Vaught

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Frontmatter
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Fie Upon “But Yet”: Stanza Lead Words and Adversative Conjunctions in The Faerie Queene
• Chapter 2 What Comes After Spenser’s “Or” in The Faerie Queene (1590)
• Chapter 3 Words that Matter in Donne’s Definition Poems
• Chapter 4 “That follows not”: The Non Sequitur in Hamlet
• Chapter 5 Judith H. Anderson, Spenser’s Temple of Venus, and the Elysian Garden of Love Poetry
• Chapter 6 “I that Do Seeme Not I, Duessa Ame”: Allegory and the Limits of Description in The Faerie Queene
• Chapter 7 The Price of Kingship in Shakespeare’s Henriad
• Chapter 8 Messianic Ironies in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
• Chapter 9 Telling Time in Spenser and Ricoeur
• Afterword
• Index