A concordance to the rhymes of The Faerie Queene

Edited by Richard Danson Brown, J. B. Lethbridge

Hardback - £85.00

Publication date:

30 September 2014

Length of book:

568 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

276x219mm

ISBN-13: 9780719088889

This book is the first ever concordance to the rhymes of Spenser’s epic. It gives the reader unparalleled access to the formal nuts and bolts of this massive poem: the rhymes which he used to structure its intricate stanzas.

As well as the main concordance to the rhymes, the volume features a wealth of ancillary materials, which will be of value to both professional Spenserians and students, including distribution lists and an alphabetical listing of all the words in The Faerie Queene. The volume breaks new ground by including two studies by Richard Danson Brown and J. B. Lethbridge, so that the reader is given provocative analyses alongside the raw data about Spenser as a rhymer. Brown considers the reception of rhyme, theoretical models and how Spenser’s rhymes may be reading for meaning. Lethbridge in contrast discusses the formulaic and rhetorical character of the rhymes.

'Essential reading for Spenserians and students of English prosody.'
Craig A. Berry, Independent Scholar

'Brown and Lethbridge have produced a book that no one who is seriously interested in poetry can afford to ignore.'
Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex

'The devoted editors of this volume have given us a remarkable tool, or set of tools, with which we can now better trace the intertwined networks of sound and sense in The Faerie Queene.'
Kenneth Gross, author of Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic and Shakespeare’s Noise