Authors: Andrew Hadfield
ISBN-13: 9780198183457, ISBN-10: 0198183453
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: July 1997
Edition: (Non-applicable)
University of Wales
Spenser's Irish Experience is the first sustained critical work to argue that Edmund Spenser's perception and fragmented representation of Ireland shadows the whole narrative of his major work, The Faerie Queene. The poem has often been read in specifically English contexts but, as Hadfield argues, demands to be read in terms of England's expanding colonial hegemony within the British Isles and the ensuing fear that such national ambition would actually lead to the destruction of England's post-Reformation legacy. Where A View of the Present State of Ireland attempts to provide a violent political solution to England's Irish problem, The Faerie Queene exposes the apocalyptic fear that there may be no solution at all. The book contains an analysis of Spenser's life on the Munster plantation, readings of the political rhetoric and antiquarian discourse of A View of the Present State of Ireland, and three chapters which argue the case that the apparently Anglocentric allegory of The Faerie Queene reveals a land graduallybut clearlytransformed into its Irish "Other."
List of Abbreviations | ||
Introduction: Spenser, Colonialism, and National Identity | 1 | |
1 | The Contexts of the 1590s | 13 |
2 | 'That they themselves had wrought': The Politics of A View of the Present State of Ireland | 51 |
3 | 'Ripping up ancestries': The Use of Myth in A View of the Present State of Ireland | 85 |
4 | Reading the Allegory of The Faerie Queene | 113 |
5 | The Spoiling of Princes: Artegall Thwarted, Calidore Confused | 146 |
6 | 'All shall changed be': 'Two Cantos of Mutabilitie' and the Sense of an Ending | 185 |
App | Works mentioning Ireland in the title entered into the Stationers' Register during Elizabeth's reign | 203 |
Select Bibliography | 205 | |
Index | 219 |