Edmund Spenser, a Reception HistoryCamden House, 1996 - 239 strani Survey of Spenser's critical reception, showing how it is conditioned by period and cultural context. Spenser was vital to attempts to define what English literature should be: in Tudor England, a Protestant literature; in Stuart England, a modern literature; in Hanoverian England, a romantic and British literature. In Victorian Britain, lecturers and essayists used Spenser to exemplify the proper aims of a popular and moral literature, while in the twentieth century philologists and academic critics have used The Faerie Queene to illustrate the workings of 'culture'. |