Spenser's Secret Career (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture) [Hardcover]

Richard Rambuss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 26, 1993 | Series: Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Book 3)

Edmund Spenser (c.1552-99) conducted two careers at once: a celebrated poet, he also pursued a lifelong career as secretary to various political and ecclesiastical figures. Richard Rambuss's ground-breaking book explores the ways in which this latter profession informed his poetic career. It argues that for Spenser, the manipulation of secrets provided a strategy for self-promotion and a means of measuring his distance from royal and aristocratic power. The study presents a new picture of Spenser and examines ideas of gender, power, and subjecthood in the Renaissance.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book is to be valued especially for pointing the way to a more nuanced engagement with...Spencer's poems." Modern Philology

"...one of the more exciting of recent books on Spenser; and, remarkably, for such a stylish study, it is a model of argumentative and stylistic lucidity." P. Cullen, Choice

"Spenser's Secret Career is an excellent test case for the value of 'narrow' literary biography--that is, a work that accounts for a writer's career in terms of a single theme or preoccupation....Rambuss is a good close reader and a perceptive analyst of cultural context....we should welcome this book...for the distinctive illumination it provides." Sixteenth-Century Journal

"Rambuss's study enhances the critical repertoire by providing a well-written and often rewarding introduction to its subject. His analysis also provides further evidence that Spenser's command of poetic means of secrecy empowers his texts to depart from political orthodoxies....Rambuss's study clarifies some broader difficulties current in much New Historicism." Kenneth Boris, Dalhousie Review

"...an elegant and painstaking reading...one of the most well-constructed readings of its kind..." Nigel Smith, Times Literary Supplement

Book Description

Spenser's Secret Career is an interesting study of the interplay of secrets and secrecy in Spenser's poetic texts and his careerist negotiations, as well as in conceptions of gender, power and subjecthood in Renaissance culture.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (February 26, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521416639
• ISBN-13: 978-0521416634
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #165,386 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #13 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Eastern European

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