Paul J. Hecht - Böcker

What Rosalind Likes begins with the strange ferocity of Elizabethan responses to poetry: a woman named Rosalind expresses scorn for a shepherd's poems, and a character in a play loses his temper and storms off stage at the sound of a blank verse line. What are these people so angry about? Thus begins a journey into a world where the details of poetic form and vagaries of Latin translation are caught up in the dynamics of gender, sexuality, class, and race, and power, where too much alliteration, for example, could destabilize your gender or pose a threat to national security. Situated in the crucial final two decades of the sixteenth century, What Rosalind Likes takes three figures named "Rosalind" in works by Spenser (The Shepheardes Calender), Lodge (Rosalynde), and Shakespeare (As You Like It) to create a new approach to literary history and feminist criticism. The development and emergence of Rosalind as one of the most famous and beloved characters in the Shakespeare canon is thus connected to the troubled history of Virgilian reception, to tensions between aesthetics and sexual empowerment and powerlessness, to methodology associated with postcritique, including surface reading and the valorization of negative emotions, and to queer theology. The book ends by thinking about Rosalind with respect to the poetry of Mary Wroth, and examining depictions of Rosalind on stage and screen by Dora Jordan and Katharine Hepburn.

Spenser in the Moment collects specially commissioned essays critical of established readings, each of which in surveying the state of the art attempts radically to unsettle our conception of the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552–1599). The editors were drawn together by a shared restlessness with the canonical Spenser, and a sense that attention especially to Spenser’s musical qualities, and the distinctiveness of his poetic style compared with that of his contemporaries, could display exciting new paths forward. Scholars from three continents contribute bracing reviews of Spenser’s relationship with his classical sources, with religious history, and the history of the book. Two essays consider Spenser and music, both music in Spenser’s works, and Spenser’s works in the music of his time. Two working poets inaugurate the final group of essays on Spenser’s poetry, with original, irreverent poetry reflecting and riffing on Spenser. The essays argue for various versions of revolution: one mixing aesthetics and sex, another diagnosing widespread fallacies (“expressivist” and “dramatistic”) made in reading Spenser, and the last arguing for a Spenser not of enormous interlocking networks, but of the moment: that the primary Spenserian structure is that of a moment of stillness-in-motion. With so much change behind us already in this young century, another series of changes emerges from recent work, and a sense of expectation, as of held breath, seems to pervade the discipline—that is the moment that this volume attempts to capture and nourish.