Spenser's Famous Flight

In Spenser's famous Flight, Patrick Cheney challenges the received wisdom about the shape and goal of Spenser's literary career. He contends that Spenser's idea of a literary career is not strictly the convential Virgilian pattern of pastoral to epic, but a Christian revision of that pattern in light of Petrarch and the Reformation.

Cheney demonstrates that, far from changing his mind about his career as a result of disillusionment, Spenser embarks upon and completes a daring progress that s...