52.1 (Winter 2022)

As Rachel Eisendrath, one of this issue’s contributors suggests, ‘Reading is committed, like a subjectivity, to not being a unified, singular, finished thing but to being that which can continue to unfold in time’. The winter has been long (and this issue delayed), but the current issue offers an array of reading to help unfold through it. Read more…

This special issue of Explorations in Renaissance Culture, edited by Thomas Herron, makes a welcome addition to the commentary on Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland. The collection is framed as a departure from critical business as usual, and as a return to first principles. The framing doesn’t quite line up, however, with what we get, and it’s worth thinking about why this is. Readers should not expect much engagement with Spenser’s Irish environs, we’re told, nor any exalting of his poetry over his prose. But who these days goes out of her way to denigrate the View as mere prose? Not many. Read more…

I remember reading that Keith Thomas collects clippings, his own cut-up notes, and library lists and puts them in envelopes with various topic headings – and that when it’s time to start writing, he selects ‘a fat one’, dumps its contents on his desk, and sorts through what’s there. Something like this process of accrual pertained to my writing Gallery of Clouds – even as what I was accruing came less from the realm of historical fact (although there is that, too) and more from the realm of imagination and of personal reflections on the experience of reading. Read more…

A Gorgious Gallery, of Gallant Inventions, printed by Richard Jones in 1578, pitches itself to readers with a flurry of metaphorical and relentlessly alliterative enticements. This anthology is hailed by its title-page as ‘Garnished and decked with diuers dayntie deuises, right delicate and delightfull, to recreate eche modest minde withall’. On top of its poetic charms, readers are promised a paradigm of expert craftsmanship, in the poems themselves, and in their compilation: ‘First framed and fashioned in sundrie formes, by diuers worthy workemen of late dates: and now, ioyned together and builded vp: By T.P.’ Each of these claims is picked up by Anthony Munday in his commendatory poem a few pages later. Read more…

Arthur F. Kinney, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English, died on Dec. 25, 2021, at the age of 88. Born the son of a steelworker and a school teacher in Cortland, New York, Kinney went on to serve as a faculty member at UMass Amherst for 50 years, retiring in 2016 as the Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History. Read more…