Edmund Spenser and the Poetics of the Early Modern Shore

This chapter traces the presence of the littoral in the writings of the sixteenth-century poet and colonial administrator Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599), considering the motifs of shipwreck, boundary crossing, and amphibiousness that shape his poetry, as well as his engagements with the shoreline as an emblematic topos and site for allegorical making. Underlying the chapter’s readings is an attention to the materiality of the fraught shores with which Spenser was familiar and how they provided fertile ground for meditations concerning worldly mutability and ideas of nation, resulting in compromised notions of pastoral ease. Littoral space, and its representations, the chapter argues, offered Spenser and his contemporaries a literary location at which to plot ideas and ideals that had not yet taken permanent form, and which remained subject to the shifting ecological and often violent political currents of their time.