Richard Danson Brown

Cymbeline and the Sonnets (Shakespeare)

Shakespeare 1609

The Art of The Faerie Queene offers a new approach to Spenser's massive Elizabethan epic, presenting it is as a formally radical and innovative text. Where previous criticism has presented Spenser as a conservative technician, this book explores his unexpected experiments with form in the service of its complex allegories.

The Art of the Faerie Queene

This study investigates Louis MacNeice in two major central strands. Firstly, it explores MacNeice's ambiguous positioning as an Irish poet. As the Ulster-born son of a Home Rule supporting Protestant bishop, MacNeice straddles rival cultural and ideological territories without ever fully committing to either. A sense of dislocation and homelessness underwrites MacNeice's poetry which makes it resistant to nationalistic appropriation and encourages his readers to see him more as an international poet. Secondly, this study presents MacNeice as a critically self-conscious writer; his readiness to explain his work helps to account for his influence on later poets. By virtue of the clarity of his explanations of his own procedures, MacNeice offered his successors workable templates of how his poetry might be written.

Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s

Suman Gupta

Textbook introduction to key debates from the early twentieth century to modernisms emerging between First and Second World Wars. Examines in detail texts by Chekhov, Mansfield, Gibbon, Eliot, Woolf, Brecht and Okigbo.

Debating Twentieth-century Literature 1900-1960

Aestheticism & Modernism

Riding current critical interest in a somehow neglected collection of poems published at the height of Spenser's career, Brown (literature, Open U., UK) introduces scholarly reconstructions of The Complaints (1591), and reads them as innovative social complaint poetry. E.g., the author views "Mother's Hubbard's Tale" as breaking with the traditional fable form. Appends comments on the character Urania-Astraea and allusions to "Divine Elisa" (i.e. Queen Elizabeth) in The Teares of the Muses. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Novelty and Tradition in Spenser's Complaints

The New Poet

J. B. Lethbridge

This book is the first ever concordance to the rhymes of Spenser’s epic. It gives the reader unparalleled access to the formal nuts and bolts of this massive poem: the rhymes which he used to structure its intricate stanzas. As well as the main concordance to the rhymes, the volume features a wealth of ancillary materials, which will be of value to both professional Spenserians and students, including distribution lists and an alphabetical listing of all the words in The Faerie Queene. The volume breaks new ground by including two studies by Richard Danson Brown and J. B. Lethbridge, so that the reader is given provocative analyses alongside the raw data about Spenser as a rhymer. Brown considers the reception of rhyme, theoretical models and how Spenser’s rhymes may be reading for meaning. Lethbridge in contrast discusses the formulaic and rhetorical character of the rhymes.

A concordance to the rhymes of The Faerie Queene

The Art of The Faerie Queene is the first book centrally focused on the forms and poetic techniques employed by Spenser. It offers a sharp new perspective on Spenser by rereading The Faerie Queene as poetry which is at once absorbing, demanding and experimental. Instead of the traditional conservative model of Spenser as poet, this book presents the poem as radical, edgy and unconventional, thus proposing new ways of understanding the Elizabethan poetic Renaissance. The book moves from the individual words of the poem to metre, rhyme and stanza form onto its larger structures of canto and book. It will be of particular relevance to undergraduates studying Elizabethan poetry, graduate students and scholars of Renaissance poetry, for whom the formal aspect of the poetry has been a topic of growing relevance in recent years.

Richard Danson Brown

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