Description

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'.
David Radcliffe argues that Spenser's writings entered actively into the process of redefining what literature is and does. In epigrams and verse epistles, prose redactions and scholarly essays, the Poet's Poet became the Critic's Poet, as various readers adopted his typology, characterisation, allegory, description, narrative devices, and modes of interpretation.