Abstract
"In "Befitting Emblems of Adversity," David Gardiner investigates the various national contexts in which Edmund Spenser's poetic project has been interpreted and represented by modern Irish poets, from the colonial context of Elizabethan Ireland to Yeats's use of Spenser as an aesthetic and political model of John Montague's reassessment of the reciprocal definitions of the poet and the nation through reference to Spenser, Gardiner also includes analysis of Spenser's influence on Northern Irish poets. And an afterword on the work of Thomas McCarthy, Sean Dunne, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and others discuss how Montague's reinterpretation of Spenser influenced this most recent generation of Irish poets."--Jacket.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 214-227) and index.