I'm just too taken with the idea of "monopoly capitalists" enthusiastically
reading Spenser to complain.
At 05:37 PM 8/22/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>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
==============================================
Beth Quitslund
Assistant Professor of English
Department of English
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701
phone: (740) 593-2829
FAX: (740) 593-2818
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