Salvaging Spenser is a major new work of literary revision which places Edmund Spenser's corpus, from The Shepheardes Calender to A View of the Present State of Ireland, within an elaborate cultural and political context. The author refuses to engage in the sterile opposition between apology and attack that has marred studies of Spenser and Ireland, seeking neither to savage nor to save, but rather, in a project of critical recovery, to salvage Spenser from the wreckage of Irish history.

Preface - Acknowledgements - Introduction: Salvaging Spenser - 'Who knowes not Colin Clout?': The Shepheardes Calender as Colonial Text - Spenser's Irish English: Language and Identity in Early Modern Ireland - Varieties of Englishness: Planting a New Culture Beyond the Pale - 'Who knowes not Arlo-hill?': Changing Places in The Faerie Queene - 'And nought but presed gras where she had Iyen': Royal Absenteeism and Viceregal Verses - How Milton and Some Contemporaries read the View - The View from Scotland: Combing the Celtic Fringe - Spensership: a Judicial Review - Select Bibliography: Spenser and Ireland - Notes - Index