Description
Edmund Spenser’s Poetry
A NORTON CRITICAL EDITION
SECOND EDITION
This revised and enlarged edition of Edmund Spenser’s Poetry contains the most extensive selections from the poet’s work presently available in any comparable volume. All the selections in the First Edition from The Faerie Queene (Books I and III complete, important extracts from Books II and VI, and the Mutabilitie Cantos complete) have been retained; newly added are the Proems to Books IV and V, the account of the Temple of Venus in Book IV, and the Isis Church episode in Book V. From The Shepheardes Calender, the June, November, and December eclogues are now included, together with the January, April, and October eclogues from the First Edition. The selection of sonnets from Amoretti has been increased by one. Epithalamion and Fowre Hymnes are complete, as in the First Edition. Muiopotmos and Prothalamion are now included as well. All these additional materials have been chosen with a view to providing the student with a wider and more fruitful range of selections than the First Edition made available; and, in particular, with an eye to those aspects of the poetry that have been significantly illuminated by critical studies since 1968. As in the First Edition, the texts are drawn from the honored editions. The editor has introduced some minor modifications in spelling, but no other alterations have been made. For practical convenience, individual words are glossed in the margin. The footnotes provide the student with a sensible basis for informed comprehension, avoiding over-simplification equally with needless complexity. Footnotes to poems included in the First Edition have been revised to sharpen their precision or to improve their clarity, and also to take acount of the most incisive criticism that has appeared since publication of the First Edition. Each major selection is followed by an Editor’s Note that explores important textual and critical problems.
The Essays in Criticism have been thoroughly revised to reflect particularly those critical approaches and insights that have shed new light on Spenser’s poetry in recent years. At the same time, those critics of an earlier day and of our own time whose influence continues to have special force for contemporary readers are not neglected. As in the First Edition, “E.K.,” John Hughes, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge represent early critical views. Twentieth-century criticism included in the First Edition, by Douglas Bush, Paul Alpers, Northrop Frye, S.K. Heninger, Jr., 1. W. Lever, Louis Martz, and William Nelson, is retained, together with newly selected essays by Thomas P. Roche, Jr., Graham Hough, Kathleen Williams, and Hallett Smith. Twentieth-century critics whose work is now included for the first time are Edwin Greenlaw, A. C. Hamilton, F. M. Padelford, C. S. Lewis, A. Kent Hieatt, Jr., Harry Berger, Jr., Humphrey Tonkin, Ricardo Quinones, and Isabel G. MacCaffrey.
THE EDITOR
Hugh Maclean is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York-Albany. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and has also taught at the Royal Military College of Canada, theUniversity ofCincinnati, and York University. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and the editor of Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, a Norton Critical Edition.
In good to very good condition with the exception of some highlighter marks towards the end of the book.
Paperback
743 pages
