This book provides an authoritative guide to debate on Elizabethan England's poet laureate. It covers key topics and provides histories for all of the primary texts. Some of today's most prominent Spenser scholars offer accounts of debates on the poet, from the Renaissance to the present day. Essential for those producing new research on Spenser.

ChinaÕs enormous size, vast population, abundant natural resources, robust economy, and modern military suggest that it will emerge as a great world power. Inside ChinaÕs Grand Strategy: The Perspective from the PeopleÕs Republic offers unique insights from a prominent Chinese scholar about the countryÕs geopolitical ambitions and strategic thinking. Ye Zicheng, professor of political science in the School of International Studies at Peking University, examines ChinaÕs interactions with current world powers as well as its policies toward neighboring countries. Despite claims that repressive domestic policies and an economic slowdown are evidence that the countryÕs efforts toward modernization will fail, Ye points to ChinaÕs inclusion in the G-20 as an indicator of success. Ye compares ChinaÕs global ascension, particularly its emphasis on peace, to the historical experiences of rising European superpowers, providing an insider look at a country poised to become an increasingly prominent international power.

In Spenser's Forms of History, Bart Van Es presents an engaging study of the ways in which Edmund Spenser utilized a number of "forms of history"--chronicle, antiquarian discourse, secular typology, political prophecy, and others--in both his poetry and his prose, and assesses their collective impact on Elizabethan poetry.

This book studies the interplay of theology and poetics in the three great epics of early modern England, the Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained. Bond examines how Spenser and Milton adapted the pattern of dual heroism developed in classical and Medieval works. Challenging the opposition between 'Calvinist,' 'allegorical' Spenser and 'Arminian,' 'dramatic' Milton, this book offers a new understanding of their doctrinal and literary affinities within the European epic tradition.

Though his writings have long been integral to the canon of early modern English literature, it is only in very recent scholarship that Edmund Spenser has been understood as a preeminent anthropologist whose work develops a complex theory of cultural change. The contributors to this volume approach Spenser’s work from that new perspective, rethinking his contribution as a theorist of culture in light of his poetics. The essays in the collection begin with close readings of Spenser’s writings and end by challenging the ethnographic allegories that shape our knowledge of early modern England. In this book Spenser is proven to be not only a powerful theorist of allegory and poetics but also a profound and subtle ethnographer of England and Ireland. This is an interdisciplinary volume, incorporating studies on history and art history as well as literary criticism. The essays are based on papers presented at The Faerie Queen in the World, 1596-1996: Edmund Spenser among the Disciplines , a conference which took place at the Yale Center for British Art in September 1996.

Spenser in the Moment collects specially commissioned essays critical of established readings, each of which in surveying the state of the art attempts radically to unsettle our conception of the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552–1599). The editors were drawn together by a shared restlessness with the canonical Spenser, and a sense that attention especially to Spenser’s musical qualities, and the distinctiveness of his poetic style compared with that of his contemporaries, could display exciting new paths forward. Scholars from three continents contribute bracing reviews of Spenser’s relationship with his classical sources, with religious history, and the history of the book. Two essays consider Spenser and music, both music in Spenser’s works, and Spenser’s works in the music of his time. Two working poets inaugurate the final group of essays on Spenser’s poetry, with original, irreverent poetry reflecting and riffing on Spenser. The essays argue for various versions of revolution: one mixing aesthetics and sex, another diagnosing widespread fallacies (“expressivist” and “dramatistic”) made in reading Spenser, and the last arguing for a Spenser not of enormous interlocking networks, but of the moment: that the primary Spenserian structure is that of a moment of stillness-in-motion. With so much change behind us already in this young century, another series of changes emerges from recent work, and a sense of expectation, as of held breath, seems to pervade the discipline—that is the moment that this volume attempts to capture and nourish.

The author's predecessors focus almost exclusively on the Metamorphoses as intertext, but do not often distinguish between early modern Latin editions of the poem and translations such as Arthur Golding's. Although Spenser read Ovid in his native language, during the quarter-century of his writing career, his countrymen such as Shakespeare, Donne, and Lodge imitate and recast the ancient author. During this English aetas Ovidiana, a translation industry arises simultaneously so that the entire corpus is rendered into English, from Golding's Metamorphoses (1567) to Wye Saltonstall's Ex Ponto (1638). Since the sixteenth century did not often read or hear a Roman poet in prose renditions, the author uses Renaissance poetical verse translations (with the Latin text) to explore Spenser's variegated use of Ovid: how he sounded as early modern English poetry.