Manchester University Press - Spenser and Virgil

Dubbed 'the English Virgil' in his own lifetime, Spenser has been compared to the Augustan laureate ever since. He invited the comparison, expecting a readership intimately familiar with Virgil's works to notice and interpret his rich web of allusion and imitation, but also his significant departures and transformations.This volume considers Spenser's pastoral poetry, the genre which announces the inception of a Virgilian career in The Shepheardes Calender, and to which he returns in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, throwing the 'Virgilian career' into reverse. His sustained dialogue with Virgil's Eclogues bewrays at once a profound debt to Virgil and a deep-seated unease with his values and priorities, not least his subordination of pastoral to epic.Drawing on the commentary tradition and engaging with current critical debates, this study of Spenser's interpretation, imitation and revision of Virgil casts new light on both poets-and on the genre of pastoral itself.

Reviews

'The volume concludes with a valuable index of cited passages. Production values throughout are of an admirably highstandard. In short, this is a book that all lovers of classical and English Renaissance literature will profit from consulting. To the degree that they absorb its lessons, they will have a better understanding of some of the most hauntingly beautiful of poetic compositions.'
Lee Fratantuono, Ohio Wesleyan University, Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 43

'Pugh is to be commended on a major contribution toSpenser studies and to the study of the reception of Virgil. This is a bookthat deserves to be pondered by Early Modernists and classicists alike.'
Philip Hardie, Trinity College, Cambridge, The Spenser Review

'The volume concludes with a valuable index of cited passages. Production values throughout are of an admirably high standard. In short, this is a book that all lovers of classical and English Renaissance literature will profit from consulting. To the degree that they absorb its lessons, they will have a better understanding of some of the most hauntingly beautiful of poetic compositions.'
Lee Fratantuono, Ohio Wesleyan University, Medievalia et Humanistica

Awards

2018

Winner of the Isabel MacCaffrey Prize in recognition of the best book in Spenser Studies published in 2015/16

Introduction
1. Intertextuality and allegory in Virgil's Eclogues
2. Virgilian negotiations in The Shepheardes Calender
3. Virgilian structure in The Shepheardes Calender
4. Reshaping the Virgilian cursus: pastoral vocation in 'Astrophel'
5. Reimagining the pastoral muse in 'Colin Clouts Come Home Againe'
Index