This book was compiled by Alastair Fowler from notes left by C. S. Lewis at his death. It is Lewis's longest piece of literary criticism, as distinct from literary history. It approaches The Faerie Queene as a majestic pageant of the universe and nature, celebrating God as 'the glad creator', and argues that conventional views of epic and allegory must be modified if the poem is to be fully enjoyed and understood.

Gary Waller surveys Spenser's career in terms of the material conditions of its production - the often overlooked material factors of race, gender, class, agency - and the resonant 'places' which influenced his career - court, church, nation, colony. The book includes an original account of the gender politics of Spenser's work and his difficult position between Ireland and England, the 'homes' about which he held ambivalent feelings. Waller also discusses the 'place' the biographer occupies in writing a literary life.

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is among the most important literary products of the Elizabethan age, and the vast sweep of its moral, political and social concerns tells us more about the age than any other work. This volume, first published in 1989, offers detailed readings of each of the poem’s seven books, along with introductory chapters on Spenser’s career, and the roots of the poem in the English and continental traditions. Humphrey Tonkin pays particular attention to the work’s political and cultural role and its contribution to the development of Elizabethan ideology. A comprehensive analysis, this reissue will be of particular value to literature students and academics alike.

The six original essays on Spenser's poetry contained in this volume were first presented at the Canadian colloquium. While there is a central concern with The Faerie Queene, the essays range widely through Spenser's works and treat many aspects of his poetic vision and aritistry: his comic vein and his melancholy, his learning and his realism, his grand designs and his richness of detail. In their variety and vivacity the essays amply demonstrate the powerful appeal that Spenser's poetry exerts today and the quality of response it elicits. -- Book Jacket.

Edmund Spenser (?1554-99) was the greatest Elizabethan poet, whose Shepheardes Calender (1579) inaugurated a revolution in English poetry, and whose unfinished Faerie Queene (1590-6) was the longest and most accomplished poem written in the sixteenth century. In his approachable and informative study, Colin Burrow clarifies the genres and conventions at work in Spenser's poem. He explores the poet's taste for archaism and allegory, and the nature of epic and of heroism in The Faerie Queene. He presents Spenser as a 'Renaissance' poet who is drawn at once to images of vital rebirth and of mortal frailty. In clear, jargon-free prose he examines Spenser's equivocal relationship with his Queen and with the Irish landscape in which he spent his mature years. Spenser emerges from this book a less orthodox and harmonious poet than he is often thought to be, but as a complex, thoughtful, and attractive writer.

Focusing on works by Shakespeare and Spenser, this study shows the connection between visuality and ethical action in early modern English literature. The book places early modern debates about the value of visual experience into dialogue with subsequent philosophical and ethical efforts.