ENGL 3260 - [Spenser and the Faerie Queene]

(HB) (LA-AS)

Fall. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Student option grading.

May be used as one of the three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

B. Correll.

Edmund Spenser is the major Elizabethan writer other than Shakespeare who most influenced English poetry. But students often don’t know him, even though, in a way, they have already encountered him: Spenser’s grand epic poem, The Faerie Queene, is often seen as a major source of contemporary fantasy literature and even of the plotting of video games. As we will see in this course, it is more - much - more than that. Knights (both male and female) are tested in perilous quests and some very strange figures are encountered in this complex and intellectually challenging work, a beautifully weird, many-stranded narrative and a fascinating mind-trip through wayward desires and monstrous fears.