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My university doesn’t seem to have the journal, so I can’t read it though I’d like too. In your representation, it sounds like a classic, if aggressively old-fashioned, depiction of what Ellen Meiksins Wood calls “the bourgeois paradigm.” However, the vocabulary might be different, but I’m not sure that the argument (having not read it, again) is actually all that different from arguments about Spenser as Poet’s poet, or emphases on his “inwardness.” The class dimension of these arguments is rarely made explicit—and is usually very, very suppressed (repressed?)—but they’re all imagining a bourgeois Spenser (Rambuss puts this better than me in his article in Spenser and the Subject of Biography). Montrose, for instance, posits a bourgeoisie as the marginal alternative to Elizabethan absolutism; his argument is less strident and more subtle, but it’s not qualitatively different than a Spenser in a bourgeois class-for-itself. In both The Pristine Culture of Capitalism and The Origin of Capitalism (fun and enviably clear texts), Wood argues that bourgeois-aristocratic is a false opposition, basing herself mostly on the work of Robert Brenner. I’d guess that Spenser’s depiction of class is characteristically subtle. He does not want to be, nor does he have a vocabulary to describe, a bourgeoisie (or a middle class, or a middling sort, etc); instead, he tends to articulate class antagonism, and occasionally class struggle, in the vocabulary of “nobles” and “queens.” But this focus on nobility doesn’t mean he’s only, as Marx put it, England’s ass-kissing poet—there’s a lot of quiet social distinctions and less than quiet antagonism going on everywhere (FQ 3.11.46 seems to me a very, very tricky stanza to read). A similar argument is now routinely made in terms of gender—Spenser’s idolization of Elizabeth cuts any number of ways—but for some reason an analogous class argument has not gotten much play. cw ---- Original message ---- >Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 17:37:53 -0700 >From: Jean Goodrich <[log in to unmask]> >Subject: article review >To: [log in to unmask] > >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 Christopher Warley Assistant Professor Department of English Oakland University 248-370-2256