Spenser's Irish Work

by Herron, Thomas

• ISBN13: 9780754656029
• ISBN10: 0754656020
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-08-31
• Publisher: Ashgate Pub Co

Summary

Exploring Edmund Spenser's writings within the historical and aesthetic context of colonial agricultural reform in Ireland, his adopted home, this study demonstrates how Irish events and influences operate in far more of Spenser's work than previously suspected. Thomas Herron explores Spenser's relation to contemporary English poets and polemicists in Munster, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Ralph Birkenshaw and Parr Lane, as well as heretofore neglected Irish material in Elizabethan pageantry in the 1590s, such as the famously elaborate state performances at Elvetham and Rycote.New light is here shed on the Irish significance of both the earlier and later Books of The Fairie Queene. Herron examines in depth Spenser's adaptation of the paradigm of the laboring artist for empire found in Virgil's Georgics, which Herron weaves explicitly with Spenser's experience as an administrator, property owner and planter in Ireland.Taking in history, religion, geography, classics, and colonial studies as well as early modern literature and Irish studies (including bardic poetry), this book constitutes a valuable addition to Spenser scholarship.

Table of Contents

Introduction: ruin or monument? Cultivating optimism in early modern Ireland

Finding Spenser's Ireland

Spenser and the anxious critics

Spenser's plantation life

Planting Reformation in Ireland

Walshe, Smith, Robinson and Bryskett

Spenser's heroic legacy in Munster verse

Ralph Birkenshaw and Parr Lane

Creating The Faerie Queene

Rethinking Book I from Within a Georgic-Irish Paradigm

Elemental violence and the Virgilian ladder

Flourishing monarchs

Virgil's Georgics, Gavin Douglas, and the Proem to The Faerie Queene

Plain thinking and civic celebration in Book I

Local Adversity and Apocalyptic triumph

Books V, VI and VII of The Faerie Queene

Imperial coda

Elizabethan progress and 'The Mutabilitie Cantos'

'Pagan hound'

Cúchulainn, the Souldan and the Spanish Armada in Book V

Taming Raleigh's beast: monastic dissolution and local politics in Book VI

Bibliography

Index

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