Fruit of Barren Field: Edmund Spenser and the New English Georgic

Abstract

Employing the principles of intertextuality, this dissertation explores how New English authors exploited agrarian imagery in the style of Virgil’s Georgics in their writing about Ireland during the late sixteenth century. Among this community of authors, Edmund Spenser made the most sustained and meaningful engagement with the georgic mode to aestheticize Elizabethan colonial reform. A selection of Spenser’s texts—including the Dedicatory Sonnets to The Faerie Queene, the Legend of Justice, the Legend of Courtesy, and A View of the Present State of Ireland—will focus an analysis of New English ‘georgic thinking.’ As will become clear, in the georgic mode, Spenser found a common vocabulary with which he might invoke themes of militarism, improvement through labor, and divinely favored imperialism, that would be readily legible to his English readership. Throughout this analysis, a recurrent focal point will be Spenser’s georgic metapoetics, his persistent concern for poetry as a kind of virtuous labor that has distinct bearing on the foundation of an expanded imperial England. As I will conclude, Spenser’s work offers an ideal corpus upon which to test the efficacy of a georgic reading of New English writing more generally, the broader study of which produces insight into how these authors conceived of early English imperialism and their role in what was then transpiring in Ireland, as well as the role of the poet in the formation of a new, English identity that existed abroad.