Reading Guides to Long Poems
Series Editors: Isobel Armstrong & Sally Bushell
The series enables readers to re-engage with the long poem as a vital form. Volumes provide generous extracts, or in some cases complete poems, from significant works combined with a reading guide and teaching tips from enthusiastic lecturers who have taught the poem.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: A Reading Guide
Andrew Zurcher
Introduces a Renaissance masterpiece to a modern audience
This Guide will help new readers to understand and enjoy The Faerie Queene, drawing attention to its various ironies, its self-reflexive construction, its visual emphasis and the timeless ethical, political, and literary questions that it asks of all of us. The book includes key selections from the poem (each accompanied by a headnote, commentary and glosses), historical and critical discussions, teaching and learning plans and a guide to further resources in electronic and print media.
Key Features
* Contains substantial selections from The Faerie Queene
* Provides an integrated introduction to Spenser's life, the intellectual and historical context of his writing and the poem's critical reception
* Includes a range of suggestions for teaching and learning about the poem, both in formal seminars and through independent study
* Contains a bibliography of further resources, including a list of editions, a list of key critical studies of the poem and a selection of useful websites
Andrew Zurcher is a Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, where he teaches English literature. He is the author of Spenser's Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England (2007) and the co-editor of Edmund Spenser, Selected Letters and Other Papers (2009). He is one of the General Editors of the forthcoming Oxford University Press edition of Spenser's Collected Works.

Dr Andrew Zurcher is Fellow and Newton Trust Lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Spenser's Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England (Boydell and Brewer, 2007).

Preface: How to read The Faerie Queene
Series Editors' Preface
1 Mapping and Making
2 Selections from the poem
3 Contexts and Reception
4 Teaching the Text
5 Resources for Study
Index