Spenser's secret career

Resource Information

The work Spenser's secret career represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Spenser's secret career

Creator

• Rambuss, Richard

Subject

• Literature and society -- England -- History -- 16th century
• Poets, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography
• Secrecy in literature
• Courts and courtiers in literature
• Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599
• Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599 -- Pensée politique et sociale
• Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599 -- Political and social views
• Secretaries -- England -- Biography

Language

eng

Summary

Edmund Spenser (c.1552-99) conducted two careers at once: a celebrated poet, he also pursued a lifelong career as secretary to various political and ecclesiastical figures. Richard Rambuss's book explores how this latter career, usually allotted only cursory mention in accounts of Spenser's professional ambitions, informed his poetic career. Working from the fact that contemporary bureaucratic treatises defined the management of secrets as the central occupation of secretaryship, this study provides a careerist context for the attention to secrecy throughout Spenser's poetry. It takes issue with prevailing new historicist accounts which see Spenser's careerism as shaped entirely by a single-minded pursuit of laureateship along a Virgilian route from pastoral to epic. Spenser's Secret Career presents an alternative picture, arguing that for Spenser the manipulation of secrets - his own and others' - provided a strategy of self-promotion for both of his careers

Cataloging source

UkLiU

Index

no index present

LC call number

PR2367.P6

LC item number

R3 1993

Literary form

non fiction

Series statement

Cambridge studies in Renaissance literature and culture

Series volume

3