Approaches to Teaching Spenser's "Faerie Queene" (review)

Fictions of Production

“…Such an approach does not seek to replace narratives of early modern women's known textual agency with a "disjointed record of textual dispersal" dismantling the recov-ery of early modern women's writing just as it gains complexity and scale. 11 Instead, it sees the historical, anonymous, and fictional woman writer as coexisting in the reader's imagination, both in the early modern period and beyond. Reputation becomes a useful vehicle for thinking through these complexities where the texts attributed to a woman writer because of her status might feed into both her own production of texts and the ways in which she was situated as a "writer" in the reader's mind.…”