Courses

This course centers on the writing of Edmund Spenser, early modern England’s self-styled national poet. We will devote much of our attention to The Faerie Queene; a complex, strange, profound, and often funny poem that entwines romance and epic, it is Spenser’s major poetic achievement. Characterized by turns as Elizabethan propaganda (Karl Marx called Spenser “Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet”) and a studied critique of Tudor political mythology, The Faerie Queene’s allegory is everywhere engaged with the challenges, dangers, and delights of reading itself. As part of our assessment of Spenser’s poetry, we will confront his role as secretary to Lord Arthur Grey during England’s brutal colonization of Ireland. Taking Spenser’s poetic and political careers together, this course will uncover the deeply contradictory aims of writing in the early modern humanist tradition, which questioned traditional class hierarchies and imagined new ways of fashioning the self at the same time that it helped to sanction England’s burgeoning imperial ambitions.