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From the Fountain to the Well: Redcrosse Learns to Read by Hester Lees-Jeffries UCH attention has been paid to the unfinished, open, ‘‘end- lesse’’ nature of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, in recent criti- M cism in particular. I do not dispute this approach to the text: many of the labyrinthine, allusive and intertextual qualities that it has illuminated and elucidated are germane to my discussion. Yet book of the poem is in many respects a highly ‘‘finished,’’ discrete literary unit; moreover, it is itself vitally concerned with beginnings and end- ings, origins and sources and, especially, the poet’s own negotiations of their congruences and confluences. In this reading, I will suggest that in book Spenser employs various kinds of fountains to explore ideas about sources (including the humanist return ad fontes), questions of genre, the relationship between landscape and narrative, Protestant his- tory and polemic, and his own inheritances, responsibilities and anxi- eties as a poet. Some of what I will show and argue below is necessarily synthetic, juxtaposing some long-established strands of Spenser criti- cism. My focus on the fountains, however, is a fresh one, and aims to show that in Spenser’s usage this figure is
Studies in Philology – University of North Carolina Press
Published: May 1, 2003
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