Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos

Description

This is the first collection of essays devoted to Edmund Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos (1609), and it celebrates the 400th anniversary of the first publication of that intriguing, posthumously-published fragment of his unfinished epic, The Faerie Queene (1590-96). It brings together leading and emerging Spenser scholars from the US, UK, Ireland and India to asses and assert the significance of the Mutabilitie Cantos to Spenser's work ad thought. All eleven essays are origional and specially commissioning for this substantial volume with contributions from James Nohrnberg, Gordon Teskey and Judith Anderson. Although broadly historical, in keeping the principles with The Manchester Spenser series, the collections encompasses an impressive variety of approaches and interests, ranging from historical allegory and material, political, philosophical and literary contexts of the Mutabilitie Cantos, as well as their commanding place in early modern English and Irish literature and history. The collection also includes a full bibliography of scholarly criticism of the Mutabilitie Cantos. This collection will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, to scholars of Spenser and scholars of renaissance studies -- .

Jane Grogan is a lecturer in the school of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin -- .

Winner of the 2013 Isabel Maccaffrey award for best book or article 'There is high-quality work here, including clear scholarship from Andrew Zurcher on the printing of the Cantos, a delightful essay from Richard Danson Brown on Spenser's diction, and outstanding analysis of the poem's Lucretian metaphysics from Ayesha Ramachandran. The most innovative contribution comes from Grogan herself as she traces the Mutabilitie Cantos' reception via Yeats to Seamus Heaney. This final delicately written essay stands out for its political and literary subtlety and encapsulates something of the allusive brilliance of Spenser's voice itself.' The TLS, 3/12/2010 -- .