Hiya, Spenserians.
A quick question, I hope. Is anyone familiar with Pauline Kogan's article,
"Class Struggle in the Superstructure in Spenser's Faerie Queene," in
Literature and Ideology, 1970? Have there been any reviews?
Kogan represents Spenser as being a part of a self-aware bourgeois class,
actively working toward what sounds to me like a too-monolithic, coherent
agenda to promote middle class values. There are other things that trigger
warning bells for me in this article: the representation of Sir Philip Sidney
and the Sidney family as bourgeoisie (along with other "bourgeois men of
prominence" including the earl of Leicester -- now, if you're an *earl* can
you really be bourgeois?), an unqualified assertion that Spenser was connected
to the Spencers of Althorpe, the idea that allegory as a genre has "class
associations" and makes a "suitable medium of ideological propaganda," and the
portrayal of Giordano Bruno as a visionary asserting a "bourgeois cosmology."
Oh, and then there's the concluding sentence of the article: "The recent
revival of his [Spenser's] poetry is part of the efforts of the monopoly
capitalists to mobilize all their cultural despotism in self-defence." Ahem.
Opinions, please?
Thanks, as always.
Jean Goodrich
English Department
University of Arizona
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