Introduction: General Ends and First Essentials -- "The Falsest Twoo": Forging the Scholarly Reader -- Una's Line: Child Readers and the Afterlife of Fiction -- Mining the Text: Avid Readers in the Legend of Temperance -- Half-Envying: The Interested Reader and the Partial Marriage Plot -- Reading Against Time: Crisis in The Faerie Queene -- Blatant Beasts: Encounters with Other Readers -- Coda: Reading to the End
Summary:
"Despite its canonical prestige, Edmund Spenser's epic six-part poem The Faerie Queene (1590-96) has never been easy or altogether pleasurable to read. As this book describes, the poem's first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, did so under duress, and returned the manuscript with a plea that Spenser write something else instead. Virginia Woolf's tongue-in-cheek advice to twentieth-century readers eager to cultivate a taste for The Faerie Queene-"The first essential is, of course, not to read The Faerie Queene"-sums up a tradition of readerly resistance to the poem. As a consequence of its difficulty, the poem has an extraordinary capacity to induce doubt in readers-about Spenser, about themselves, and about the enterprise of reading itself. Each of the six chapters in Nicholson's book considers the poem through the lens of a different readership: scholars; schoolchildren; compilers of commonplace books, who value specific elements about the poem; Queen Elizabeth, the ostensible subject of the poem; and readers who, across the centuries, ultimately failed to understand the poem. Rather than tell us how to read Spenser's work, Nicholson describes how these individual readers, from learned scholars to precocious schoolboys, jealous queens to algorithmic search engines, have generated meaning and pleasure from an unusual and difficult text. Throughout, the author argues that that The Faerie Queene can be read not simply as literature but as literary theory, a reflection on what reading does to texts, readers, and the worlds they live in"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.