Professor%20Richard%20McCabe: List of publications
Showing 1 to 19 of 19 publications
Panegyric and Its Discontents: The First Stuart Succession
December 2018
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Chapter
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Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformations
This volume of essays explores this important category of early modern writing.
History
‘“O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place?”’: Locating Patronage in Spenser’
March 2018
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Journal article
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Spenser Studies
“O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place?”: As Piers’s despairing question indicates, Spenser’s concern with patronage stretches beyond the customary “topoi” of his paratexts to inform the topography of the verse through which he seeks it. As he proceeds from genre to genre, the geographical dislocation of his speakers figures the cultural displacement of his craft. In terms of the authorial careers he lived and fabricated—the distinct yet inextricably related careers of Edmund Spenser and Colin Clout—“place” is of crucial thematic significance to “authority,” whether it be Leicester House, Kilcolman Castle, Essex House, Mount Acidale, or the “courts” of Cynthia and Mercilla (and it is arguable whether the former three are any less fictive than the latter). Beginning with an analysis of the “place” of poetry in the pastoral landscape of The Shepheardes Calender, this article examines its various inflections through the genera that followed. Relegated to the allegedly “salvage” terrain of the Gaelic bards, Spenser creates landscapes that both attest to, and simultaneously resist, his fear of cultural assimilation. But the wish to live in fairyland, expressed in the proem to the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, concedes poetry’s inability to fashion a patronal culture worthy of heroic verse, and necessitates the adoption of an Ovidian poetics paradoxically centered on the displaced self and the “designer” wilderness it inhabits.
Patronage, gentility, and “base degree”: Edmund Spenser and Lord Burghley
September 2017
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Journal article
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Seventeenth Century
This essay examines the social asymmetry of Early Modern patronage by focussing on Edmund Spenser’s complex relationship with Lord Burghley. Both were anxious to validate their social credentials, the one as novus homo, and other as novus poeta. Burghley sought to offset criticism of his rise by consolidating a reputation for public service with claims of illustrious ancestry, and scores of dedicators obliged. Spenser was anxious to claim the status of gentleman through talent despite his obscure origins. In appending a dedicatory sonnet to Burghley in the 1590 Faerie Queene he endorses his public image in the hope of reciprocal acknowledgement. Apparently disappointed, he responds in Complaints (1591) by presenting Burghley as a mercenary parvenu, while for the first time claiming kinship to the “ancient” house of the Spencers of Althorp, thereby reversing the social hierarchy but problematizing his own criteria for gentility.
censorship, dedication, patronage, gentility
Patrons
January 2017
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Chapter
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EDMUND SPENSER IN CONTEXT
'Ungainefull Arte' Poetry, Patronage, and Print in the Early Modern Era
February 2016
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Book
From antiquity to the Renaissance the pursuit of patronage was central to the literary career, yet relationships between poets and patrons were commonly conflicted, if not antagonistic, necessitating compromise even as they proffered stability and status. Was it just a matter of speaking lies to power? The present study looks beyond the rhetoric of dedication to examine how traditional modes of literary patronage responded to the challenge of print, as the economies of gift-exchange were forced to compete with those of the marketplace. It demonstrates how awareness of such divergent milieux prompted innovative modes of authorial self-representation, inspired or frustrated the desire for laureation, and promoted the remarkable self-reflexivity of Early Modern verse. By setting English Literature from Caxton to Jonson in the context of the most influential Classical and Italian exemplars it affords a wide comparative context for the reassessment of patronage both as a social practice and a literary theme.
Steven Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare (2015) [Book review]
January 2016
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Journal article
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The Spenser Review
Spenser
October 2015
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Chapter
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The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature Volume 2: 1558-1660
This second volume, and third to appear in the series, covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of ...
Literary Collections
Ireland's Eliza: Queen or Cailleach
November 2014
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Chapter
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Elizabeth I and Ireland
The poetics of succession, 1587-1605: the Stuart claim
October 2014
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Chapter
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Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England,
Spenser and Holinshed
January 2013
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Chapter
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The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles
Plato, poetic "praxis", and Renaissance Censorship
January 2012
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Chapter
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English Past and Present: Selected Paper from the IAUPE Malta Conference in 2010
Edmund Spencer
January 2011
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Chapter
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The Cambridge Companion to English Poets
The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spencer
January 2011
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Book
Authorial Self-Presentation
October 2010
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Chapter
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The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser
The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser examines the entire canon of Spenser's work & the social & intellectual environments in which it was produced.
Literary Criticism
Ethnic Souls: Early Modern Catholicism in Ireland, Britain and Spain
January 2010
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Journal article
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Huntington Library Quarterly
Spenser, Plato and the Poetics of State
January 2009
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Journal article
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Spenser Studies: a Renaissance poetry annual
Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law 1550-1700
January 2008
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Book
Plenary Lecture: Spenser, Plato and the Poetics of State
Conference paper
The Elizabethan Maecenas: Early Modern Patronage and the Augustan Exemplar