Wring Out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001

Abstract

A profile of fifty years of criticism suggests the importance for Spenser studies of new approaches to questions concerning the repressiveness of allegory, the politics of gender, intertextual relations, and narratorial irony. Foremost among the effects of these changes on the interpretation of Book II of The Faerie Queene is an emergent attitude of skepticism toward the traditional reading in which the masculine protagonists of Temperance prove their virtue by defeating the wicked witch. The emergence of feminist and gender-oriented perspectives accompanied by more nuanced conceptions of literary mimesis has made it possible to read the demonization of Acrasia with suspicion and to explore the possibility that the misogynist and gynephobic representation of woman is a target rather a donnée of the second book; the possibility, in short, that Acrasia is a displacement of masculine akrasia. If Spenser is the poet’s poet whose poetry is about poetry, this may be so in the sense that one of its dominant objectives is to critique—and not merely to emulate—the androcentricism of the epico-romantic discourse it celebrates and continues.

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