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Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book
The first comprehensive study of the eighteenth-century response to the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, from editions to influence.
Hazel Wilkinson (Author)
9781107199552, Cambridge University Press
Hardback, published 30 November 2017
274 pages, 31 b/w illus. 2 tables
23.5 x 16 x 1.8 cm, 0.53 kg
'Hazel Wilkinson argues that The Faerie Queene was the original unread classic: the emblematic textual commodity of an age in which book ownership expanded from the domain of aristocrats and scholars to become a bourgeois expression of taste … Wilkinson's project traces that Spenserian affect-at once stately and fanciful, imperially grand and appealingly gothic-across the whole of eighteenth-century English culture, from poetry and fiction to architecture, theater, political propaganda, sculpture, painting, and landscape gardening.' Catherine Nicholson, New York Review of Books
Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590–6) occupied an important place in eighteenth-century culture. Spenser influenced almost every major writer of the century, from Alexander Pope to William Wordsworth. What was it like to read Spenser in the eighteenth century? Who made Spenserian books, and how did their owners use and interpret them? The first comprehensive study of all of the eighteenth-century editions of Edmund Spenser addresses these questions through bibliographical analysis, and through examination of the history of the book and of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Within these contexts, Hazel Wilkinson provides new information about the production, contents, texts, and reception of the eighteenth-century editions of Spenser, to illuminate how his cultural presence became so far-reaching. With each chapter structured around a major edition of Spenser's work, this volume provides a timely addition to arguments about the nature of literary history and the growing cult of great writers of the past.
List of abbreviations
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. 'The Wits have sent for the Book': (non-)reading, and Spenserian books before 1700
1. Spenser the Whig: John Hughes's Clubbable Edition, 1715
2. Miscellaneous Spenser: verse miscellanies and miscellaneous culture, 1716–50
3. Spenser illustrated: Thomas Birch's 1751 Edition
4. Spenser annotated: two scholarly editions, 1758–9
5. Spenser and the public domain: the Scottish Publishers' series, 1778–95
Appendix A: checklist of the eighteenth-century editions of Edmund Spenser
List of works cited
Index.
Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literature & literary studies [D]