Chris,
Although not nearly as ambitious as what you describe below, David
Radcliffe's Edmund Spenser: A Reception History (Camden House, 1996) at
least moves us beyond the discussion in the Variorum and is worth a look.
Ty Buckman
At 01:30 PM 07/20/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>Can I take this opportunity to stress something that came up briefly at
>the end of the Spenser conference in Cambridge (at which, incidentally, I
>had an especially good time)? The question was, what was left out of
>the conference, and someone (I didn't catch who actually) said what about
>Spenser in the 19th century? The question of Spenser in early America
>points to the same issue -- we need more studies of what used to be called
>"reception history," but what in the wake of Guillory might be called with
>more theoretical precision "canon formation." Shakespeare studies has
>lots of work like this going on,
>partly following de Grazia's Shakespeare Verbatim. No need merely to
>imitate Shakespeare studies, of course, but I think we need a Spenser
>Verbatim (or perhaps, in light of the list, a Sidney-Spenser
>Verbatim). There has been some recent work (Greg Kucich's Keats,
>Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism; Jonathan Kramnick's Making the
>English Canon, just off the top of my head), and I know there are lots of
>people out there who know
>lots about these issues. I increasingly find myself wondering to what
>extent the sorts of things I want to talk about in Spenser were invented,
>or at least addressed, by post-Enlightenment scholarship, that is, to
>what extent my concerns are repeating the (repressed?) history of Spenser
>scholarship. One thing the opening session made abundantly clear is that
>flipping through the Variorum is not sufficient.
>
>I am thinking, for instance, of Richard McCabe's irresistible nugget that
>the hall at Pembroke is not the one Spenser served in -- that Spenser's
>hall was torn down in the 19th century because it didn't look medieval
>enough. Might something similar be said about The Faerie Queene?
>
>Seeking Mute Inglorious Spensers,
>
>Chris Warley
|