Spenser’s Lost Children

Grogan, Jane

doi:10.7756/spst.028.001.1-54

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…This is not to say that Irish writers yielded wholly to Yeats's characterization of Spenser; more common throughout the 20th century were critical, politicized responses filtered through Spenser's own damning words in A View of the Present State of Ireland . Montague's The Rough Field is the best example of this, but it can also be traced in work by Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, and Brendan Kennelly (see Gardiner, ; Grogan, ). (The much less troubled acceptance of Yeats's interpretation of Shakespeare at Stratford—even the ropey allegory of Ireland's relationship with Britain that he sees in Richard II —tells its own story of the distinctions drawn between Spenser and Shakespeare in the Irish literary tradition.)…”

Section: Early Modern Ireland In Modern Irish Writingmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…We must begin with some background, for the project is not entirely a new one. From Geoffrey Keating's sharp riposte to the View of the Present State of Ireland in Foras Feasa , through the antiquarian treatises of the 18th century and the Irish novels of the 19th century, a sequence of defensive Irish responses to Spenser's writings about Ireland reaches its most prominent and influential exponent in Yeats (see O'Halloran, ; Gardiner, ; Grogan, , ). But Yeats, crucially, changes the terms of engagement, from hostile to cordial (broadly speaking).…”

Section: Early Modern Ireland In Modern Irish Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…199.) But Yeats's tragic, lyrical, ambiguous Spenser nonetheless shadows the work of a catalogue of Irish poets since, among them Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Sean Lysaght, Moya Cannon, Trevor Joyce, John McAuliffe, and Leanne O'Sullivan (see Grogan, ; Tóibín, ).…”

Section: Early Modern Ireland In Modern Irish Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This essay studies a selection of contemporary Irish writers who first established this approach and who continue to break new ground in their attempts to look past the over-privileged nationalist narrative to a longer history of cultural, political, and religious diversity in Ireland, "never mind the complex ways in which it happened." I focus in 2 of 11 GROGAN particular on Irish dramatic and poetic works of the past 20 years that look to Spenser and/or Gardiner, 2001;Grogan, 2013 (Carson, 1999), or the crude satire of Robert Welch's biographical Kilcolman Notebook (Welch, 1994). (As Gardiner usefully notes, the "impiety" of Kennelly's "irreverent" hibernicizing of Spenser in the sequence "functions as an apology for attempting to humanize characters such as Spenser or Cromwell"; Gardiner, 2001, p. 199 Grogan, 2013;Tóibín, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I focus in 2 of 11 GROGAN particular on Irish dramatic and poetic works of the past 20 years that look to Spenser and/or Gardiner, 2001;Grogan, 2013 (Carson, 1999), or the crude satire of Robert Welch's biographical Kilcolman Notebook (Welch, 1994). (As Gardiner usefully notes, the "impiety" of Kennelly's "irreverent" hibernicizing of Spenser in the sequence "functions as an apology for attempting to humanize characters such as Spenser or Cromwell"; Gardiner, 2001, p. 199 Grogan, 2013;Tóibín, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Saluage soyl, far from Parnasso Mount”: Spenser and Shakespeare in contemporary Irish writing

Grogan

2018

Literature Compass

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This essay studies the literary politics of the reception of Spenser and Shakespeare in contemporary Irish writing, theatre, and public culture. Often conceived as a project of recovery or restitution, or as a niche interest for urban élites, the mixed fortunes and contrasting politics of Shakespeare and Spenser in 20th‐ and 21st‐century Ireland testify to the still sensitive politics of settlement and plantation, as well as the blind spots of nationalism and the national model of Irish literature. Focussing primarily on the current century, this essay traces crucial lines of reception back to W. B. Yeats and the Irish literary revival, pausing over Frank McGuinness's important play Mutabilitie (1997), which dared to imagine and provocatively recast both Shakespeare and Spenser's habitation in Ireland. That project found little support, just months before the Good Friday agreement was signed, but it stands over and guides a significant body of work in Irish drama and poetry in ways that have yet to be fully unpacked. Yet the contrast remains between the hero and the whipping boy, a congenial Shakespeare and a cruel Spenser, in literary engagements with Tudor Ireland. Although Shakespeare has generally been heralded as an enabling or emancipatory figure for Irish writers, this essay proposes that a richer and more radical politics can be accessed by the thornier route of confronting Spenser's place in Irish culture and history. The essay concludes by outlining a recent flourishing of interest in Spenser that seeks to exploit his potential for Irish culture and politics in these new, more honest but more challenging ways.

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Section: Early Modern Ireland In Modern Irish Writingmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Early Modern Ireland In Modern Irish Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Early Modern Ireland In Modern Irish Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

“Saluage soyl, far from Parnasso Mount”: Spenser and Shakespeare in contemporary Irish writing

Grogan

2018

Literature Compass

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Spenser’s Petrarch

Ramachandran¹

2020

Spenser Studies

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This essay calls for a fresh look at Spenser's relationship to Petrarch-one that moves past a reliance on commonplace notions of "Petrarchism" to consider what exactly the English poet may have learned from his Italian predecessor. It thus explores what it might mean to identify Spenser as "post-Petrarchan": to love and rival Vergil, to engage in intense literary self-reflection and autobiographical self-presentation, to reach for an international, multilingual audience engaged in cross-cultural and transhistorical dialogue, and to transform the lyric from a relatively minor literary genre to one that sought epic amplitude. Spenser was my gateway drug to Petrarch-and for that, I must blame Bill Oram. An immigrant, first-generation international student, fresh off the boat and quite confident of being an economics major, I had never heard of Spenser, much less Petrarch, before I met Bill. But I still remember Bill's voice reading the opening poem of the Amoretti as I watched the leaves outside turn to red and yellow in Northampton for the very first time. Three years later, as I sat on the floor outside his office in the turretlike third floor of Seelye Hall, anxiously clutching a new copy of Durling's translation of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta in one hand and an utterly inadequate, small Italian-English dictionary in the other, it was Bill who gently reminded me that learning languages and traditions takes timeand that I was only just starting out. In the fifteen years since that evening when I almost gave up studying Italian and felt overwhelmed by the weight of all the Renaissance erudition and scholarship that menaced my fledgling

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“Is this our boasted constitution? Is this our liberty?”: Reading Milton in Ireland

Lahive

2018

Literature Compass

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This essay examines a largely undocumented aspect of Irish literary history: the reception and circulation of John Milton's writings in Ireland. Milton's negative views of the inhabitants of Ireland have been well documented, but this essay analyses some of the intellectual responses of readers, writers, and thinkers in Ireland to the English republic's leading apologist for the conquest of Ireland. I argue that such an approach is required in order to redirect the critical narrative away from examinations of the hackneyed anti‐Irish stereotypes written for colonial agendas and to shed light on the ways in which Milton was read to speak to and about a range of political, religious, social, and ethical issues in early modern and late modern Ireland. The essay also seeks to introduce my book‐length study of the topic which, ranging across printed and manuscript sources—from Irish translations of Milton's poetry to political appropriations of his controversial prose—interrogates the collective assumptions, aspirations, fears, anxieties, and prejudices of readers and writers in Ireland as they are revealed in response to the self‐conflicting voice of civil and religious liberties, on the one hand, and aggressive English colonialism on the other.

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Spenser’s Lost Children

Cited by 4 publications

References 2 publications

“Saluage soyl, far from Parnasso Mount”: Spenser and Shakespeare in contemporary Irish writing

“Saluage soyl, far from Parnasso Mount”: Spenser and Shakespeare in contemporary Irish writing

Spenser’s Petrarch

“Is this our boasted constitution? Is this our liberty?”: Reading Milton in Ireland

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