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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Reading and Not Reading the Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism

Reading and Not Reading the Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism

Nicholson, Catherine

Paperback

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0691198985
ISBN13: 9780691198989
Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
Published: May 26 2020
Pages: 312
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

The four-hundred-year story of readers' struggles with a famously unreadable poem--and what they reveal about the history of reading and the future of literary studies

I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter with me? The plaint of an anonymous reader in 1712 sounds with endearing frankness a note of consternation that resonates throughout The Faerie Queene's reception history, from its first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, who urged him to write anything else instead, to Virginia Woolf, who insisted that if one wants to like the poem, the first essential is, of course, not to read it. For more than four centuries critics have sought to counter this strain of readerly resistance, but rather than trying to remedy the frustrations and failures of Spenser's readers, Catherine Nicholson cherishes them as a sensitive barometer of shifts in the culture of reading itself.

Indeed, tracking the poem's mixed fortunes in the hands of its bored, baffled, outraged, intoxicated, obsessive, and exhausted readers turns out to be an excellent way of rethinking the past and future prospects of literary study. By examining the responses of readers from Queen Elizabeth and the keepers of Renaissance commonplace books to nineteenth-century undergraduates, Victorian children, and modern scholars, this book offers a compelling new interpretation of the poem and an important new perspective on what it means to read, or not to read, a work of literature.

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