First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the first ever book-length manifesto of Peak Oil Philosophy, Chad Haag argues that the transition to Fossil Fuel Modernity replaced the herds of megafauna of the Hunter Gatherer Worldview and the cyclically-harvested grain of the Agrarian Worldview with a single immensely powerful but quickly vanishing substance: oil. Everything we do is a euphemism for burning vast amounts of fossil fuels. Haag provides an original hierarchy of transcendental standards of meaning to reveal the extent to which our mythologies, systems, counter sense objects, and deep memes are just so many incomplete revelations of our Phenomenological awareness of petroleum. But as the globe already hit Peak Oil in 2005 and has been on the downward slope of depletion ever since, these higher order meanings have begun to collapse into falsity. Oil's peculiar role in sustaining systems of meaning precisely through imposing a hard physical limit to existence therefore requires a novel Ontology of Limitation. Haag reawakens the Heideggerian quest for Being by suggesting that even the subject itself must be understood as a limitation sustained through the limitation of, in our era, fossil fuels. Haag introduces a new table of 15 modes of truth to explicate how Peak Oil defies a simple binary of truth and falsity, given that even truth under Fossil Fuels is just a euphemism for oil's presence. Combining the Peak Oil insights of John Michael Greer and the anti-technological theories of Ted Kaczynski with the philosophical rigor of Heidegger, Aristotle, Zizek, Plato, Husserl, Descartes, and Jordan Peterson, Haag crafts a truly unique response to the challenge of joining Peak Oil and Philosophy.

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.

The Faerie Queene is a scholarly masterpiece that has influenced, inspired, and challenged generations of writers, readers and scholars since its completion in 1596. Hamilton's edition is itself, a masterpiece of scholarship and close reading. It is now the standard edition for all readers of Spenser. The entire work is revised, and the text of The Faerie Queene itself has been freshly edited, the first such edition since the 1930s. This volume also contains additional original material, including a letter to Raleigh, commendatory verses and dedicatory sonnets, chronology of Spenser's life and works and provides a compilation of list of characters and their appearances in The Faerie Queene.