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Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts pp 175–193Cite as

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Spenser’s Envious History

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism ((PSATLC))

Abstract

This chapter attends to the early modern nexus of affect, substance, and method around the glory of King Arthur, as it is engaged in historiographic controversy and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Bringing new standards of historical fact to bear on the English past, some sixteenth-century historians judged Arthur and his deeds unreal. Other historians, however, defended Arthur’s reality and charged that what had changed in the practice of history was a new envy felt in the present toward the glory of the past. Adopting a “new materialist” perspective, Landreth argues that Spenser’s pseudo-historical epic engages the strife in the Arthurian controversy between dubious facts and negative affects in ontological terms, investigating the different ways the past may “matter” in the present.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    David Landreth

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  1. David Landreth
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Correspondence to David Landreth .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. English, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

    Amanda Bailey

  2. The Graduate Center, CUNY, City University of New York, New York, New York, USA

    Mario DiGangi

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Landreth, D. (2017). Spenser’s Envious History. In: Bailey, A., DiGangi, M. (eds) Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56126-8_9

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