Research Output
1 - 2 of 2
Publication
Spenser's Lost Children
2013-12, Grogan, Jane
This essay gathers together the work of a self-selecting group of Irish poets, novelists and dramatists of the last century who directly confront Spenser and his writing in their own work. It tentatively identifies this engagement with Spenser as a crucial step in their self-conscious construction of–and attempt to enter into–a modern Irish literary tradition. Although a lways a very individual kind of entanglement, the sum of these negotiations of Spenser and his poetic legacy in Ireland testifies to the very depth and intricacy of Spenser’s roots in any version of the Irish literary tradition. But it is the writers themselves who put it best.
Publication
'So liuely and so like, that liuing sence it fayld': enargeia and ekphrasis in The Faerie Queene
2009, Grogan, Jane
In the Letter to Ralegh accompanying the 1590 Books of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser explains that precisely because his poem is ‘a continued allegory, or darke conceit, I haue thought good aswell for auoyding of gealous opinions and misconstructions, as also for your better light in reading thereof... to discouer vnto you the general intention and meaning, which in the whole course thereof I haue fashioned’. In using these terms, Spenser signals his understanding of allegory as a challenging, esoteric discipline, one for which his readers will need this clarification.