Enabling Engagements: Edmund Spenser and the Poetics of PatronageEnabling Engagements contributes to current critical debates regarding early modern subjectivity and early modern cultural capital. In stressing the boldness of Edmund Spenser's poetics of patronage, Judith Owens shows that Elizabethans could and did exercise agency within a wide range of institutions. By consistently challenging assumptions of courtly hegemony in early modern society, Owens suggests a new appraisal of the processes of cultural commodification. Enabling Engagements challenges conventional assessments of Spenser as court-centred and of patronal relations in the early modern period as asymmetrical and prescriptive. Owens demonstrates that Spenser exercised a vigorous sense of agency within the close quarters of patronage and courtly culture, fashioning his laureate's role and envisioning nationhood in resistance to the centre. She shows that his independence from court-centred values and tropes informed his poetics from the start of his publishing career, not just as a result of increasing disillusionment with the court. Owens develops detailed readings of Spenser's poetry and his paratextual material in The Shepheardes Calender, the 1590 Faerie Queene, and Complaints, providing contexts that are both broader and more varied than those usually accorded Spenser's poetry. She extends the horizons of The Faerie Queene in particular to include not only court and sovereign but also London, the material conditions of early modern publishing, and Ireland. Bringing together concerns usually approached individually, she shows us a Spenser who is neither the careerist of much recent criticism nor the Elizabethan propagandist of long-standing custom. |
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Contents
The Shepheardes Calender | 40 |
Commendatory Verses | 69 |
The Dedicatory Sonnets | 88 |
Ralegh in The Faerie Queene III | 110 |
Conclusion | 133 |
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Enabling Engagements: Edmund Spenser and the Poetics of Patronage Judith Owens No preview available - 2002 |
Common terms and phrases
1590 Faerie Queene added sonnets agency allegory Amoret Anne Boleyn argue authority autonomy Belphoebe Belphoebe's Bisham Burghley career centre chastity claims Colin Clout Colin's commendatory context court courtiers courtly cultural dedicatory sonnets early modern eclogue Edmund Spenser effects Elizabeth Throckmorton emphasis England English entertainment epic figure forest law Gabriel Harvey gifts grace Grey Harvey's Hatton Helgerson heroic Hobbinol homosociality Hunsdon imagines Immerito implies Ireland Irish Lady Carew Lady Russell Leicester lines literary London Lord Manwood matters metaphor mirror moral Mulcaster Mulcaster's Munster noble Norris Ormond pastoral patron patronage Petrarchan Petrarchan courtiership Petrarchism poet poetic poetry political Ponsonby Ponsonby's position praise Press proem Ralegh and Harvey Ralegh's poem readers reading relationship remains rhetorical role Rosalind royal Rycote seems Shepheardes Calender Sidney Sir Walter Ralegh social sovereign Spenser's poem stanza structures suggests Thenot Timias Timias's tion title-page tropes Tudor Univ verse Wolfe Wolfe's wound Wyatt's