Frushell, Richard C. Edmund Spenser in the Early Eighteenth Century: Education, Imitation, and the Making of a Literary Model. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1994.
Reviewed by William Warner | July 12, 2000
Richard C. Frushell demonstrates the scope and intensity of the Spenser revival in the eighteenth century, the way Spenser was read for enjoyment and imitated as an exemplary poet, long before the Romantic revival gave his subjects and poetic style literary centrality. This book offers a detailed account of the way Spenser’s text was taught, anthologized, and edited in the early eighteenth century; it includes an impressive trio of bibliographies, most intriguingly, a list of “Eighteenth Century Imitations and Adaptations” of Spenser.