University Park, Pa. -- Patrick Cheney, distinguished professor of English and comparative literature, along with three other general editors, recently won a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work on Volume 1 of a three-volume edition titled "The Oxford Edition of the Collected Works of Edmund Spenser." The series is expected to be published from 2009 to 2015 and will include a one-volume paperback for use in the classroom.
The grant will allow the editors to revise the 1912 publication "The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser." Additionally, the editors will create an electronic archive of important early editions of Spenser’s work. The three-volume edition will add to the well-established series on English language writers from Oxford University Press known as the Oxford English Texts.
The project was started by Cheney and the English department at Penn State University in 1998 and housed at the University’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities. A few years ago, the project moved to Washington University in St. Louis, where it is administered by Joseph Loewenstein, another general editor and the principal investigator for the grant.
The other two general editors are David Lee Miller of the University of South Carolina and Elizabeth Fowler of the University of Virginia. After receiving the grant, a fifth general editor was added, Andrew Zurcher, of Queen's College, University of Cambridge, England.
Spenser, who lived from around 1552 to 1599, is the major English poet of the 16th century and one of the four major canonical authors in English literature, along with Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. He is best known as the author of The Faerie Queene, Renaissance England's first national epic in the tradition of Homer and Virgil. He is also the author of the first major pastoral poem in English, The Shepheardes Calender, and is often regarded as the author of the most important marriage poetry in the language: Amoretti, a Petrarchan sonnet sequence; Epithalamion, a marriage ode; and Prothalamion, the first formal poem about the betrothal ceremony.
Spenser’s texts are central documents in a tradition of literary and philosophical engagement that addresses questions of public morality and the political function of private ethics. As such, they are often considered alongside the writings of Plato, Virgil, Cicero, More, Milton, Blake and Sartre. By editing these texts with care and creating broader access to them, the editors of the Oxford Spenser project hope to foster ongoing engagement with this tradition.
The NEH’s Scholarly Editions Grants program, which will fund this work, aims to support the preparation, by a team of at least two editors and staff, of texts and documents that are currently inaccessible or available in inadequate editions. More information on the grant is available at www.neh.gov/GRANTS/guidelines/editions.html.