
Contents
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Spenser and Literary Pictorialism Spenser and Literary Pictorialism
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Spenser's Visual Culture Spenser's Visual Culture
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Book Illustrations Book Illustrations
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Illustrations in Spenser's lifetime Illustrations in Spenser's lifetime
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Post‐Elizabethan book illustrations Post‐Elizabethan book illustrations
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Nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century book illustrations Nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century book illustrations
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Paintings Paintings
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Notes Notes
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Bibliography Bibliography
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37 Spenser and the Visual Arts
Get accessClaire Preston is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on early modern topics (including the literary-scientific, word and image studies, and Renaissance rhetoric) and on American Gilded Age fiction (including Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and William Dean Howells). Her recent work includes essays on Spenser and the visual arts, seventeenth-century scientific correspondence, the Renaissance reception of classical scientific and speculative writing, and the poetics of early modern drainage; her recent books include Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early-Modern Science (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Bee (Reaktion, 2006), and (with Reid Barbour), Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed (Oxford University Press, 2008). She is completing a study of literature and scientific investigation in the long seventeenth century, and is general editor of the Oxford complete works of Sir Thomas Browne (8 volumes, forthcoming 2015–18), a project for which she currently holds major AHRC funding. She is the recipient of the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a British Academy Research Development Award.
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Published:18 September 2012
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Abstract
From almost the beginning of his career, Spenser seems consciously to have referred his poetic images to the concretely painterly and plastic; and he was consistently recognized and applauded even in his own day for the rich, apparently ‘visual’ character of his poetry. The importance of the visual arts in Spenser is witnessed by the persistence of lavishly illustrated editions of The Faerie Queene, as well as some of his other poems, as late as the mid-twentieth century, and by the large body of opinion and scholarship which has devoted itself to discussions of Spenser's pictorial technique, identifications of specific pictorial referents and artistic styles behind certain Spenserian images, and speculation as to the kind of pictorial material which would have been available to him in England. All these interpretive strands firmly locate Spenser within the realm of the literary-pictorial. This article analyzes the nature of Spenser's relationship to the visual arts; what precisely is meant by Spenser's ‘pictorialism’, and the contingency of all the other matters of the Spenserian visual on such a definition.
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